I sit down with a coffee, retrieve my mail, and open it up.
I’ve received a spammy kind of message. It provides a link to unsubscribe. The link returns {“code”:1020,”message”:”fail”}.
I’ve received another spammy kind of message, this time from Yellow Pages (yp.ca). In the text, it is addressed to “[{Recipient.FirstName}]”. The message asks “How do you show up online?” Better than YellowPages shows up in my inbox, I hope.
I try to save a screen shot of this, using SnagIt. I want to save it as a .PNG. For some reason, as a default, SnagIt wants to use the last filename to which I saved, which is in MP4 format. When I try to select a different format, I find that .MP4 is the only format available. When I cancel the dialog, I can then pick a new name, but the filename that I’ve typed has been lost.
Three irritating little bugs in the first five minutes of my working day. I wonder what big bugs I’ll run into.
Postscript: Sure enough, the very next item in my inbox was a message from a client who is trying to submit an invoice payment to me. The data that I’ve provided him is accurate and has been enough to pay literally hundreds of invoices in the past.
His bank’s software, however, provides a form for the funds transfer that is sufficiently unclear and confusing that two attempts to complete it have failed. This is not a minor irritant to him and to me; it’s a major irritant that is interrupting our productivity, demanding time and effort from both of us.
Software should not be frustrating us. Software should not be wasting our time.
It’s just worrisome the number of bugs out there. To me the biggest problem is the lack of effort put by companies to actually fix the software though. I create software for my clients, and yes, it has bugs. But I will prioritize providing a fix to adding more features, in particular “large” features (those that take a lot of time/effort that take away from fixing bugs).
“Three irritating little bugs in the first five minutes of my working day. I wonder what big bugs I’ll run into.”
This one took me off-gaurd 😂
But no kidding it’s irritating specifically for the banking software, the uncertainty and risk are ubove all.
In 2016 I gave a talk at the Lean, Agile, Systems Thinking (LAST) conference. My topic was “Improving software in a discombobulated industry”. In this talk I gave 18 examples of broken software. All those examples were from software that caused massive disruptions, resulted in billions of dollars of loss to organizations, and were extremely frustrating to the common folks like us.
Software should not be frustrating us. Software should not be wasting our time. Software should not be causing loss of life and money.
We should be building better software.