Very often, during discussions about the correct operation of some software feature, I encounter a situation where the functionality from the user’s side looked strange, illogical. The discussion with the product owner looked something like this:
–There is clearly a behavioral problem here
– Well, we’ll release it and when users start complaining, then we’ll fix it
– ??? Well ok…
It seems to be a working scheme, right? A fairly optimal algorithm for teams with a small budget, tight deadlines, insufficient research/lack of UI/UX specialist. Users will complain if anything, no big deal.
A Google search shows that the source of this method comes from the article – “Complaint-Driven Development” by Coding Horror
Once I was punching products, including a bologna sausage for 300 rubles, through a terminal in a supermarket, I left the store with this sausage, fully confident that it was paid for – the terminal offered not to print a receipt and I agreed, so as not to waste precious paper on this receipt. During the process of “punching” the product for each product, the terminal beeped, which signals that everything worked correctly. Plus, with an audible notification, the terminal winked with the backlight from the barcode scanner.
The next day I went to the supermarket for groceries again, scanned the products through the terminal. At the exit I was met by a man of southern appearance with a thick beard, holding out his smartphone he said – “Is that you on camera?”, I looked at his phone and saw myself in a Melodic-Death-Metal T-shirt of the band Arch Enemy with skulls and all that, there was no reason to doubt.
“Yes, it’s me, what’s the matter?” the man, squinting very hard, said “You didn’t get the sausage yesterday” – wow
After a short clarification of who he was and how he made these conclusions, he showed me a video hanging on the ceiling of the store, in the video I punch a sausage, the terminal blinks with the backlight from the scanner, I put the sausage in the bag.
– The video shows how the scanner worked
– You haven’t worked anything, pay for the sausage!
Slightly taken aback by this attitude, I demanded a complaint book to write that the terminal needs software improvements, since it gives all the signs of correct operation, but in fact it simply glitches, without signaling about it on the screen.
After 10 minutes of bickering with him and his boss, who immediately came running to defend his employee and the poorly working terminal, they decided to call the administrator’s girl so that she would bring the complaint book and punch in the doctor’s sausage.
That day I realized how difficult it is for users to complain about hardware and software products, and that the mantra “people will complain – we’ll fix it” most likely works very poorly. The main reason is people who defend broken robots, broken software solutions, for simplicity I propose to introduce new terms – Defender of a Broken Robot and Defender of Broken Systems.
Ordinary users cannot complain about the malfunctioning of terminals because they are bothered by Zasroshniki, who for some reason become attached and start to love the machines they work with, perhaps considering them some kind of animate entities, forgetting that there is nothing alive there.
A similar situation occurs with ZaSS people, these people can foam at the mouth to defend some stupid shortcomings in frameworks, programming languages or any other software product, despite complaints from users and other developers.
A typical conversation with a ZaSSshnik is as follows:
– Here’s something that doesn’t work, according to the documentation everything seems to be correct
– Ah, so you haven’t read that manual from 2005, where at the bottom in small letters it says that you need to add PROGRAM_START:6969
– ??? uh
Such people may not understand how they themselves contribute to the spread of problems, errors, loss of time and money for themselves and others. Because of them, everyone suffers, because digital transformation is impossible if the non-obvious, problems of software and hardware solutions are hushed up.
I know about the recent story of the Horizon bug in the British Post Office software, which has been driving people into debt, ruining marriages and lives for decades. It all happened because people kept silent about the software problems, thereby “protecting” it.
Friends, don’t be ZaSRoshniks and ZaSSoshniks, treat the tools you work with with a grain of salt, otherwise you are in danger of being totally enslaved by crappy, broken systems, like hostages in the new digital world of the future. For those who can’t – at least don’t interfere with other people trying to pay attention to non-working, interfering software/hardware, because the developers of these products agreed – “When users start complaining, then we’ll fix it”
Sources
https://blog.codinghorror.com/complaint-driven-development/< /a>
https://habr.com/ru/articles/554404/< br />
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
