There are no small changes (2011)

#1

Post by ankit84 » Sun, Apr 16, 2017, 7:24 AM UTC

There are no small changes (2011)
blog.intercom.com

Re: There are no small changes (2011)

#2

Post by ankit84 » Sun, Apr 16, 2017, 9:32 AM UTC

Being as engineers or manager, we often over look this aspect. If quality is important, nothing is a small change.

Re: There are no small changes (2011)

#3

Post by bluepnume » Mon, Apr 17, 2017, 3:42 AM UTC

Not to mention "Does my character-counter work with unicode?"

Re: There are no small changes (2011)

#4

Post by hasenj » Mon, Apr 17, 2017, 3:51 AM UTC

A lot of these questions can be answered easily of you setup some sort of protocol within your application for form validation and error handling.

If everything is ad hoc, then every little change is going to have a thousand implicit question that every developer on the team is going to answer differently.

Re: There are no small changes (2011)

#5

Post by IChrisI » Mon, Apr 17, 2017, 4:11 AM UTC

I once updated a client's email address on a site to be their new one.

It was a small change.

There are some small changes.

Re: There are no small changes (2011)

#6

Post by drailing » Mon, Apr 17, 2017, 5:30 AM UTC

First question should be: can we only receive SMS reviews if we have a 140 character limit? Is it a problem for a SMS if there is no limit?

Re: There are no small changes (2011)

#7

Post by janwillemb » Mon, Apr 17, 2017, 6:04 AM UTC

IChrisI wrote: post #5

I once updated a client's email address on a site to be their new one. It was a small change. There are some small changes.

True, but the point of the article is that some small changes tend to grow into not-so-small changes on closer inspection, and that they take hours instead of minutes.

Re: There are no small changes (2011)

#8

Post by interfixus » Mon, Apr 17, 2017, 6:14 AM UTC

There are plenty of small changes in well-designed systems.

Had this system from the start had a defined limit on the length of inputs, the change would have entailed the changing of a constant, and possibly a rewrite of an error message/instructional oneliner, nothing more.

Re: There are no small changes (2011)

#9

Post by ankit84 » Mon, Apr 17, 2017, 6:15 AM UTC

IChrisI wrote: post #5

I once updated a client's email address on a site to be their new one. It was a small change. There are some small changes.

Saying a "issue is small", depends on someone's knowledge.

* An individual's knowledge can be limited based on his technical experience.

* his knowledge about product features

Re: There are no small changes (2011)

#10

Post by dagw » Mon, Apr 17, 2017, 12:21 PM UTC

IChrisI wrote: post #5

I once updated a client's email address on a site to be their new one. It was a small change. There are some small changes.

I once got exactly the same request and said "sure that will only take a few minutes" . I turned out that half the places where the e-mail appeared was in images. So instead of a simple search-replace job it suddenly turned into either a Photoshop job or a completely redesign non-trivial parts of the site job.