It’s a Wilderness in Here “I can’t stand this. I’ve been looking for this hat for the last 45 minutes,” complains Davey, as he swings a coonskin cap…

Do You Validate Parking?“What are we going to do, Mercedes?” Edsel asks wearily.Together, Mercedes and Edsel are reviewing the latest billing printoutfor their firm, Denton and Denton Parking Garages. They havebeen purchasing batch billing services from a small, local computerservices company since they acquired three parking garagesin a medium-sized metropolitan area. Denton and Denton ParkingGarages rents daily, monthly, and yearly parking places to corporationsand individuals.Mercedes replies, “I’m not sure what our next move is, but thebilling is all wrong. Maybe we should try to talk to the IT people.”“They said they could figure out how to compute these chargesfrom looking at what the old owners did by hand before, and theysaid they didn’t want to run the old and new systems in parallel,”Edsel remarks, shaking his head. “That isn’t right, though. At leastI can’t figure it out. Maybe you can.”Mercedes accepts the notion of chasing the suspect output andstarts looking at the report in detail. “Well, for one thing, they don’trealize we get cars from all over in here. Wherever we’ve got a carwith plates that aren’t in-state, it seems as if the computer stops figuring.Look, our plates start with a number and then a letter, right?Well this one from New York begins with three letters. The computercan’t handle it,” she says.Edsel catches on and starts to think about the business as helooks at the printout. “Yeah, and look here. This person doesn’t havea yearly account number, just a monthly one, so no bill came out,” hesays. “We’ve got monthlies, too, and the computer doesn’t know it.”“And look at this. It still made daily charges for the three daysin November when we told them right out there weren’t any vacanciesfor daily customers. It isn’t reasonable,” Mercedes asserts.Edsel continues paging through the printout, but Mercedesstops him, saying, “Don’t look any further. I’m calling the IT peopleso we can get this mess straightened out.”How would you characterize the problems being encounteredwith the current garage billing system? Use a paragraph to formulate aresponse. What are some tests for validity of data that could be includedin the software for a revised billing system for the parking garages? Listthem. What could the programmer and analysts for the computer servicescompany have done differently so that the customer was not facedwith correcting the poor-quality output? Use three paragraphs to do acritical analysis of what was done and what should have been done.____________________________q2