Re: Error handling strategies (db related)

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At 4:13 PM +0200 4/27/10, Peter Lind wrote:
If only the world consisted of smart users ... I think, however, that
we're generally closer to the opposite. And no, I don't hate users -
I've just seen too many people do things that were very far removed
from "smart".

Regards
Peter

Peter et al:

Smart is a relative term. I have one account where the majority of users are PhD's -- and they indeed have the "smarts" and the sheepskins to prove it.

You would be surprised as to how many of those forget their logons and insist that they did not enter their logons as they were recorded. For example, I had one user (i.e., fictitious Mary Smith) who said that "marysmith" was not her logon because she always uses "msmith" for all her logons -- but that was what was recorded in the database.

I tried to explain to her that the database doesn't make this stuff up, for example how would the script know to use "marysmith" for her logon if she had not provided it? But somehow it was the script's fault for not knowing she always uses "msmith". Keep in mind these are people with PhD's. I have many other stories.

As I see it, one of the problems we face as developers is confronting user's egos. They have an image of themselves and our scripts can threaten that image by making them feel ignorant. We have to deal with that in a way that informs them, but doesn't demean them in any fashion.

Here's a real world example -- over 20 years ago a company made an electronic hand-held chess game.

While the game was successful, the company received a considerable amount of repairs, way over what they had expected. They wanted to find out why and after an investigation they found that their software made the computer's chess-moves TOO quickly. So, they place a time delay into the software so that it would "look" to the user like the computer was thinking about its moves. That time-delay solved the problem.

Apparently, some end-users got pissed when they thought the computer could so easily beat them. But, if the computer took more time to beat them, then that was more acceptable and the end-users were less inclined to throw the game into a wall.

So with respect to software engineering, how users view what's going on is important.

Cheers,

tedd

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