I have been attending a quality conference this week & found a gentleman who wrote 20,000 lines of VB code to allow users to generate graphs through an Excel GUI interface. After the presentation on his Visual Basic analytic system, I approached him to obtain the detail of his 8 month turn around. Of course, most of the time (as always) is spent in the requirements generation phase. But wouldn't it be nice if the development phase was nothing?

I essentially wrote a SAS Stored Process to complete a similar task with one SAS program - less than 25 lines of code total. Plus the added benefit of surfacing this report through the web or through the SAS Add-in to Microsoft Office product. He was TOTALLY stunned.

Going with a 'simplified' coding mechanism reduces development defects, drastically cuts development time, and gives users multiple mechanisms to generate/interface with the data.