Programming
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Two of my all time favorite authors, Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates, coined the phrase, ”Code [your project] as if the next guy to maintain it is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live.” I truly wish more people would take that to heart. All too often I am working on a maintenance task, and I find that I spend more time trying to figure out what the hell the code is doing than I spend actually fixing the bug.
Take, for instance, the following real code snippet that a colleague of mine recently sent me…
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Widgets, those mini-software applications, that you can download and embed on web pages, are on a tear, and most of them are coming from third-party developers. Some examples are applications such as iLike, Bunchball Games and Picnik. Forbes recently highlighted the explosive growth of widgets in this recent article. To illustrate this growth, Forbes cites the story of Facebook, which opened its platform to third party developers in May of 2007 and now has nearly 13,000 widgets available that have been downloaded 765 million times.
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I wanted to buy a high-definition DVD player this holiday season. I was getting tired of how long it was taking my cable provider and the various networks to make the switch to more HDTV programming, so I thought at least with a Blu-ray or an HD DVD player, I could get my pixels worth on our TV watching movies in an HD format.
At the store, I looked at the movies that are now available in high-def, but was disappointed to find there were many titles I wanted that were only available in one format or the other. Then I looked at the players. Yikes...I thought I heard the prices had come down, but both Blu-ray and HD DVD players were still in the $400 range. Sticker shock. Not wanting to plunk down $400 on the losing platform (not to mention the cost of the movies), I left the store disappointed without making a purchase.
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The worst kind of bug is one that was developed into a software application by design. To better illustrate what I am talking about, take this example from worsethanfailure.com:
As the recent father of twin babies, Philip B. was relieved to learn that his employer’s benefit provider, Sun Life Canada, made the insurance process really simple. Adding the little ones on the plan required no more than a phone call to provide birth dates, names, and that sort of thing. All seemed so easy, until the customer service rep realized what Philip was trying to do: “I’m sorry sir, but we need a different birth date for each of your kids.”
“Uhh, er,” Philip stuttered, rather puzzled, “they’re twins? They were both born on the seventh of May, so they actually do have the same birth date.”
“Oh yes, I understand,” she said, “but our system cannot handle two people with the same last name born in the same month of the same year on the same plan.”
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They sound similar. And they are often used (erroneously) interchangeably. Both terms, reliable and quality, can be used to describe a software application that has a low degree of error. But there is one fundamental difference between the two. One is objective, measurable, and can be estimated, whereas the other is based on primarily subjective criteria…
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