Me as a developer and how my apps are used. (1 Viewer)

deletedT

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I just saw this on tik tok.
It reminded me how my colleagues use my apps.


 

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NauticalGent

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I can relate. But...and I guess I am lucky in this regard, I have two users who will find the ONE thing I overlooked and find it quickly.

I use them as beta testers. If they run out of "bugs" chances are no one else will find one either!
 

deletedT

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I wish I could find someone too.
 

theDBguy

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I wish I could find someone too.
Bugs are inevitable. What I don't like is when users don't tell you there's a problem and either just live with it or find creative ways to get around it.
 

pbaldy

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Bugs are inevitable. What I don't like is when users don't tell you there's a problem and either just live with it or find creative ways to get around it.

I have those too, and it is annoying. Had a recent situation where I was integrating functionality in my app to a third party app. The functionality in my app was fine so the users didn't bother telling me they were getting an error message, even though I had told them about the integration and to tell me if they got any errors. Arrg!!
 

pbaldy

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I just saw this on tik tok.
It reminded me how my colleagues use my apps.

That's funny! There are users that have an uncanny knack for finding ways of doing things you didn't anticipate. I guess anticipating them makes us better developers.
 

Mark_

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Bugs are inevitable. What I don't like is when users don't tell you there's a problem and either just live with it or find creative ways to get around it.

Almost as annoying as finishing up the change request, rolling out a new function that is on their "Must have" list, and going back 6 months later to see they never use it.

Really hated seeing a call center passing out calculators at a sight I'd done a system for selling services at. One of their managers asked "Can't we get the computer to do this for us?"

I looked them in the face, put my hands to the sides of my head, and looked to be in deep thought for a few seconds. Then I said "Press Control K".

To their amazement a fully functional calculator popped up on their screen, preloaded with the value for the entry they were in.

"How did you do that?" I was asked.

I didn't mention it had been there for HALF A YEAR BECAUSE THEY HAD ASKED FOR IT...
 

Gasman

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Bugs are inevitable. What I don't like is when users don't tell you there's a problem and either just live with it or find creative ways to get around it.

Just been to a training session for our new computer system that the charity is going to use and hence myself as a user. This has been thoroughly UAT tested before being rolled out for training.

You select an address from a list after putting in a postcode, and selecting the Find button.

The address list is presented as follows
Code:
1 Address Line1
10 Address Line1
110 Address Line1
2 Address Line1
20 Address Line1
210 Address Line1
211 Address Line1
8 Address Line1
:banghead::banghead:
 

The_Doc_Man

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MANY years ago I worked for a company that made specialty control systems with a display and a keyboard with a ton of special keys. We had a brand new system and were ready for a phase-one customer demo - to show that while we weren't done, we WERE making some progress on their contract. (That way we could bill them for X percent of contract value.)

Their chief operator liked what he saw but said he had to give us the ass-id test (he drew it that way on purpose.) So he sat on the special keyboard. Not more than 15 seconds later he crashed the system. He explained that his operators would casually sit where they shouldn't be sitting because while they weren't minimum wage, they weren't likely candidates for the Nobel Prize either. He exposed the flaw that our system didn't protect itself from buffer overflows. That fix went in IMMEDIATELY and after that, we never again crashed a system.

A couple of weeks later we were talking about hiring a tester to help us foolproof our programs. However, that led to a discussion of how we might advertise for the position: "Help Wanted - Perfect Fool - to test foolproof programs." When the laughter died down, the next question was "But what fool would hire him?" Followed by "If he's such a fool, why would he even apply for the job? What fool WOULD apply?" Needless to say, the rest of the afternoon was foolishly wasted.
 

isladogs

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I agree that bugs are inevitable and that users will not pass on info about bugs they experience.

For one of my schools apps, I went through adding automatic error logging code to every procedure. Its a huge app and doing so took me several weeks. As well as logging error details (who/what/where/when etc) to a table, the code 'silently' emailed me the error log. I had asked permission to do this beforehand but the individual users were totally unaware of this happening.
When I rolled out the new system the first few weeks were hell with a lot of emails related to a fairly small number of errors from a limited number of users.

I fixed all those bugs, released an update and the emails stopped. Its now been about 18 months since any errors occurred.

So as far as I'm concerned, job done.
The code proved its worth by the fact that its now apparently redundant

Some time prior to that I also added a process to log the use of each feature in the same app.
Doing so allowed me to prioritise updates according to usage.
Like Mark said, I had previously spent a lot of time delivering requested updates that were rarely used.
The usage log gave me evidence to support why certain requests were more important than others.
 
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The_Doc_Man

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My biggest Access system for the Navy had that logging idea, though it didn't silently e-mail me the logs. The security guys were pretty cool about a lot of things but they shut the door on the idea of silent e-mails even for one of our own (i.e. not 3rd party) apps. I wanted to, but they said no. All e-mail had to be consciously triggered.

I gently refrained from comments about how some civil servants would never send any e-mail at all under that requirement. After all, the security guys were civil service, too.
 

Minty

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In a couple of my systems I started logging which reports were being run and if they were being exported to excel, and by who.

I wasn't being nosey, just intrigued about which of the 4 million slightly similar report options I'd been asked to create were actually being used...
 

isladogs

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I gave my clients the option to opt out of the error logging emails with a simple combo box yes/no setting controllable by program admins.
Although there was an initial hesitation by some clients, all agreed to it once they understood its purpose.
I had originally planned to include a screen grab as an email attachment but couldn't get working reliably.
However Anders Ebro has an excellent Access Crash Reporter utility with that feature (but not the email part)
 

kevlray

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As my job doing QA for Sierra On-Line games, we were supposed to try things that would think that no one should. Unfortunately we missed an easter egg that a programmer had planted that we should have caught. Too many times we followed the script to just be able to get through the game.
 

Vassago

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As my job doing QA for Sierra On-Line games, we were supposed to try things that would think that no one should. Unfortunately we missed an easter egg that a programmer had planted that we should have caught. Too many times we followed the script to just be able to get through the game.

Dare I ask which one?
 

Mark_

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As my job doing QA for Sierra On-Line games, we were supposed to try things that would think that no one should. Unfortunately we missed an easter egg that a programmer had planted that we should have caught. Too many times we followed the script to just be able to get through the game.

I used to know a tester for Blizzard. One issue he'd run into involved boundary spots that were not obvious. In some cases you could get stuck if you wandered into just the wrong place in just the right way, but the odds of one person finding it were rather small.

Of course with hundreds of thousands of players running around like maniacs SOMEONE is bound to hit the error, but a dozen testers spending hundreds of hours each looking for these issues seldom hit them all.
 

The_Doc_Man

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There is a thing called an "action point" as a concept in programming, a place where you have a decision or choice or alternative or SOMETHING where human input is involved in some way. Not even counting the sprites / non-player characters of any modern game, you have an action point at every texture swap on the road because of "handing off" the player from one location to another. If you stop to consider all the edge intersections for all graphic textures in an open-world game (I'm thinking Elder Scrolls III, IV, and V or Fallout 3, New Vegas, and 4, or any member of the Witcher series), the real surprise is that people don't "fall through the cracks" (literally) every time they take a step in-game. What's that old chant that elementary school kids used to sing? "Step on a crack, step on a crack, break your mother's back."

THAT is my idea of a play-tester's nightmare - finding all the edges in an open world.
 

Mark_

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THAT is my idea of a play-tester's nightmare - finding all the edges in an open world.

Funny, as a player in Fallout 4 I've exploited some of these "Cracks" when the spawn system randomly puts something where IT shouldn't be in the first place. Recently updated a wiki on how to get to a place you shouldn't be able to get to when the target for a radiant quests is spawned outside where you normally can go.
 

kevlray

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Kings Quest V (if I recall correctly). The user did something odd with the sled and they got an interesting animation (message for the the programmers girlfriend). Then there is a timing issue with KQ VII. The programmers used the wrong timer and the only way to get through a particular scene (when the computers got faster) is to use a program to slow down the CPU. But alas KQ VII (at least for me) will not run on Windows 7, but will run on Windows XP.
 

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