I’m Sorry: Your Software Project Will Never Be Finished.

I’m Sorry: Your Software Project Will Never Be Finished.

No, really. In fact, when you go live, your software shouldn’t be “done.” If it is, you’ve done something wrong. You see, in the history of software, there’s never been such a thing as a piece of software that launched without bugs. Think of your favorite, most used platforms. Gmail. Facebook. Salesforce. All are brimming with bugs. Every day a user writes into their contact forms about a bug they discovered, and while a lot of them are PEBKAC errors, a lot of them are legitimate bugs. And the ticket tracker logs them, someone triages them, and, eventually, most of them will be corrected.

Empty Catch Blocks

Empty Catch Blocks

A normal user is going to click your button.
The user won’t see any kind of error message, which is maybe what you intended, but on the other hand, the button will seem to do nothing. The user will have no way of knowing whether she did anything wrong. The user will try it several times out of desperation. Then the user will attempt to contact you… No, actually that part may never happen. Then the user will close your app and go to bed because there is no conceivable way to determine what’s wrong or even if there is something wrong, and it’s literally too much trouble to ask. You’ll never know there’s a problem until nine months later when the user has to call you about a completely unrelated matter…

What Is a Bug?

The term “bug” is fairly common in this age of technology. Most people seem to understand that in the context of software or technology in general, it means something bad or annoying, especially because that’s what a bug is in nature. Some bugs may go unnoticed, some...

Don’t bug me?

Have you ever had one of those days? I’m not talking about those really bad days when everything seems to go wrong. I’m talking about one of those days where everything is going right and then there’s the one bug that crops up that spoils the streak. I was having an...