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.
At my first internship, for a a feature I given a excel file of all the possible options for a dropdown menu written by the product manager. My team lead showed me how to create insert statements to fill the SQL table off it in excel. Simple to do and worked great.
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!
At my first internship, for a a feature I given a excel file of all the possible options for a dropdown menu written by the product manager. My team lead showed me how to create insert statements to fill the SQL table off it in excel. Simple to do and worked great.