Interesting you mention prototyping with Excel. A much underused tool when it comes to expressing business requirements. I received a giant Word doc concerning pricing precious metals project. I told the customer to take that away and build a spreadsheet. I then coded the backend direct from the spreadsheet. Any anomalies were checked against the spreadsheet, which quickly revealed the customer didn't know all their pricing rules!
In another project I had to send a spec to a futures backoffice developer that wanted to add forex/OTC product support that showed how to calculate profit & loss, margin, commission and roll charges for forex/OTC products. Instead of a giant word doc, I created a single spreadsheet with four tabs showing all the different cases.
Interesting you mention prototyping with Excel. A much underused tool when it comes to expressing business requirements. I received a giant Word doc concerning pricing precious metals project. I told the customer to take that away and build a spreadsheet. I then coded the backend direct from the spreadsheet. Any anomalies were checked against the spreadsheet, which quickly revealed the customer didn't know all their pricing rules!
In another project I had to send a spec to a futures backoffice developer that wanted to add forex/OTC product support that showed how to calculate profit & loss, margin, commission and roll charges for forex/OTC products. Instead of a giant word doc, I created a single spreadsheet with four tabs showing all the different cases.
The work was done perfectly, first time!