MactoThe boundaries of a prison
Macto is a prison management system. To be rather more exact, it is an incarceration management system. Managing a prison is a very complex process (did you ever think about who takes the trash out? Or how to handle things like watch rotations?).
I am getting ahead of myself, however. The first thing that we have to do when we start designing a system is check:
- What is the scope of the system?
- What is the intended usage?
- Who are the users?
- What other systems are we going to interface with?
Those are the basics, because in a lot of projects, they don’t get asked.
Running a prison is a complex task, I already said. If we wanted a single piece of software to do it all, we would have to do a lot of stuff that we don’t really need. For example, are we going to write our own payroll system for the prison’s stuff? Our own medical software to manage the infirmary? What about managing the inventories in the prison (how many prison uniforms and tear gas canisters we have)? What about the maintenance software for the fleet of vehicles required to run even a small prison? Or how about… but I think that you get my drift.
There are a lot of aspects where it would be significantly better to get an of the shelve solution rather than try to write our own version of that. We need to be focused where we would provide actual utility to our customer.
That is what I said that we are going to build incarceration system, not a prison management system. Macto is all about managing the aspects of a prison that are different than those of any other business.
You can read about Macto in my initial post about it, here, since it put the context of the system in a nice perspective.
I am not sure if there will be code available, but I am going to outline my thinking here, and I think that this would be valuable in itself.
Macto is going to be about managing the aspects of a prison that you can’t get off the shelve. In order to do that in a way that would make sense to you, I need to first explain what we are going to be doing.
Like any good architect, I’ll be doing that by starting with the model, which is also the cue for the next post.
More posts in "Macto" series:
- (17 Aug 2011) Looking at warrants
- (15 Aug 2011) Talking to nasty people
- (11 Aug 2011) Counting is The Holy Grail
- (10 Aug 2011) Getting Started, you never forget your first Inmate
- (08 Aug 2011) The Main Screen
- (03 Aug 2011) Warrants are for fools
- (01 Aug 2011) Non functional concerns, you are a legal system
- (28 Jul 2011) And it goes on your permanent record, too!
- (27 Jul 2011) Once more from the top, I swear I had a few more over there
- (26 Jul 2011) Day to day life
- (22 Jul 2011) Where is the Inmate anyway?
- (19 Jul 2011) Let’s CREATE an Inmate
- (12 Jul 2011) Creating The Model
- (05 Jul 2011) The boundaries of a prison
- (25 Jul 2009) An end to end sample
Comments
Where does the name, Macto, come from?
Daniel Macto in latin means: macto to magnify, glorify, honor, slay, fight, punish
I see, thanks. Anyway, I look forward to the coming discussions :-)
Ayende, have you assembled the dev tem for Macto project yet? It would be great to follow your discussions on public group like google groups.
Toper, Yes, we are now pretty much closed, will have more to see (and then open the group) in about a month.
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