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Old 10-02-2015, 09:25 PM   #1
mking55
All Star Starter
 
Join Date: Jun 2002
Location: Boading, China
Posts: 1,249
In praise of Sebastian and the conundrum developers face

First of all, I would like to thank Sebastian for fixing the photo problem that I was making "such a fuss" about. It really was a bug and it really is fixed now. Unfortunately I had to be a "pain in the ass" to get something to happen but that is the reality. Also unfortunately, I had to be the only user who was on a MAC playing historical and using photos. It's tough to be the cheese who stands alone. Sometimes you do have to be a pain to get people to really look closely at things to get them solved.

As I've mentioned a few times, I worked as a developer for over 20 years so I have some idea of the problems these guys face. Our software (where I worked) could run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars so we had to be on our toes, as they say. The biggest problem is you get users who tell you of a bug that is not a bug. They've done something wrong, or the software doesn't perform as they think it should. That is not a bug.

I'm guessing here, but I'd say about 5% of the time it really is a bug. Sometimes you're lucky and everyone gets the same bug and it takes you about 8 seconds to recreate. Then there are other times when it is quite difficult to reproduce the bug. You have to do certain things in a certain sequence and remember to report exactly what you did. Your bug may be related to your setup. However hard it is to find, it's a bug.

What is the poor developer to do? Does he spend countless hours chasing phantom bugs that are really user errors? That seems like a waste of time to me. But if that is the route they choose to go (and I would get 99% of developers go that route), then it's up to the user to have all their data and facts ready and to be ready to keep pestering them until they are blue in the face. It's unpleasant for everyone. It's more unpleasant on a public forum such as this as opposed to just talking to customers on the phone.

Do you think I enjoy making a pest of myself? Really, I don't. However, sometimes I have to because there really is a bug and unfortunately I have to prove it before I am taken seriously. I will be right about the bug more than I'll be wrong, but sometimes I will be wrong.

We, as users, must report exactly what our setup is and what we did to cause the "bug" to appear. Developers don't have the time and money to spend chasing down all the phantom bugs out there. They must play the percentages to put our money to good use.

Although things seem to get heated at times, there should never be any hard feelings involved. It's natural for sometimes tempers to flare a little. So what, it happens.

And of course, all's well that ends well. And once more a big thank you to Sebastian.
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