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| Tester: | "I get an exception when I enter non-numeric data into the "Cost of goods sold. What are the people that buy and run our software supposed to do?" | ||
| Developer: | "It's a training issue! The customer should know they're only supposed to enter numeric data in that field." |
I can't begin to tell you how many times I've heard variations of this in my career as a software developer/business analyst. And I'm not happy about it.
It's not a training issue, people!
Anytime I hear something like this, I know that some developer has forgotten to put in some obvious validation and isn't given the time to fix it. Or, worse, is afraid to fix it for fear that something else will break (but that's another discussion altogether, and worthy of its own post).
This particular example is trivial, and could probably be fixed in about ten minutes. There are, of course, more complicated situations.
But, in my humble opinion, the closer you can come to building software that doesn't allow the customer to do something she's not supposed to do, the better off you'll be. And your customers will be happier.
I have heard this same thing so many times it is frightening. The other common one that I hear, normally in conjunction with this one, is this: "Do it like this for now, and we will fix it later...". However, later never seems to come along and you end up with a huge mess of an application.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback, Sir Tristan. Yeah, I've certainly heard that one a lot as well. It's all part of the "Just get it done. We'll deal with the problems when they come up." theme. :-(
ReplyDelete