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Bug Blindness

danluu.com

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11–20 of 223 posts

Re: Bug Blindness

#11

Post by asimilator »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #2

This is rather interesting to read. But it reinforces something I've seen in my career. The majority of users of software I've helped build, they use it in ways that are mind bending to me. Workflows I would never think of, that somehow do what they need. The second one is most software contains bugs. Users that expect to get things done simply choose workflows to avoid the worst consequence of those bugs very quickl…

> The second one is most software contains bugs. Users that expect to get things done simply choose workflows to avoid the worst consequence of those bugs very quickly.

I feel like a substantial source of everyday irritation are bugs like this in bad software. It’s frustrating that devs just don’t care.

You could make software that doesn’t require your users to work around its shortcomings.

Re: Bug Blindness

#12

Post by aljgz »

Did I write this?

I choose tools I use, configure them, report bugs, and occasionally contribute fixes. But when I can't, I work around them, yet never get used to the workaround.

"Habitual mitigation" does not happen in me, and it's partly intentional.

I have created bad software in the past, but when I saw how people work with it, I could not be proud. Learned to look at software like a user, and don't want to unlearn that.

I believe (or maybe I hope) software will be democratized and people will start to demand good software.

Re: Bug Blindness

#13

Post by aesthesia »

encomiast wrote: post #5

I had to give up when the first example of a "bug" that the author could see, which others are blind to, was search results. "In some cases, people sent me their actual search results. In every such case, the search results did not contain a good result that I could see" Software that does not meet expectations, especially in a field like search, which is basically a long running war between SEO and search engines, i…

Later in the article he uses "quality blindness" instead, which is probably a better description of most of the issues he talks about.

Re: Bug Blindness

#14

Post by transcriptase »

My absolute favorite bug is the one where the “cancel your Amazon Music subscription” is seemingly the only one of what must be tens of thousands of UI elements in the Amazon app that simply loads a blank white screen no matter what.

What are the odds!

Re: Bug Blindness

#16

Post by kmoser »

> At times, I've tried to see if I can get a job somewhere where I just fix quality issues all day. This has never panned out, due to some combination of this not being a very high priority and it also not being a normal role that companies have a role for.

I'm pretty sure dedicated QA roles are a thing at many companies.

Re: Bug Blindness

#17

Post by scottg489 »

kmoser wrote: post #16

> At times, I've tried to see if I can get a job somewhere where I just fix quality issues all day. This has never panned out, due to some combination of this not being a very high priority and it also not being a normal role that companies have a role for. I'm pretty sure dedicated QA roles are a thing at many companies.

Isn't the classic QA role typically about finding bugs not necessarily fixing them?

Re: Bug Blindness

#18

Post by lo_zamoyski »

Conlectus wrote: post #7
theandrewbailey wrote: post #3

Bug: this blog has no max-width. Lines of text will grow infinitely long with width.

For what it’s worth, the author would not consider this a bug. He does it (as I understand) because he distrusts the research on the impact of line length on readability.

Which brings us to one of the earlier claims

"I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week"

which should be rewritten as

"I easily observe hundreds to thousands of things that I consider to be bugs per week"

which is to say that the "bug" is in the eye of the beholder. It seems the author stretches the definition of "bug" to include cases where something functions, but in a manner that is open to improvement or not to his taste.

Re: Bug Blindness

#19

Post by bsder »

nicoburns wrote: post #10

Blackboard is definitely a really strong contender for the worst software I've ever had to use. When I was in uni, I went so far as to write an alternative that scraped the content from blackboard and published it on a site that I could actually browse sensibly. They were paying exorbitant amounts of money for the license too.

Applications like Blackboard exist because of the genre of "Checkboxware."

A University must comply with Laws and Regulations X, Y, Z, P, D and Q and a host of other regulations the University never heard of and Blackboard went through the process to "comply" with those checkboxes. So, if you deploy Blackboard, you tick all the checkboxes automatically.

The fact that Blackboard was a garbage content management system and a terrible grade recording system was irrelevant--because the "better" systems wouldn't check the boxes.

(I say this as someone who, as a lecturer, had to manage the account logins, mailing list, and Subversion source control system for an entire class. I only ever put grades that needed to be "secure" into Blackboard. I did all that because I HATED Blackboard that badly, but it was a LOT of work. And I probably wouldn't have passed any significant security audit; although my accessibility ratings should have been excellent since everything was plain text and plain HTML)

Re: Bug Blindness

#20

Post by kmoser »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #3

Bug: this blog has no max-width. Lines of text will grow infinitely long with width.

I had this same discussion on another HN thread a while back. I prefer lines to run as long as possible; I find it difficult/distracting to move my eyes to the beginning of the next line every few seconds. I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I have to believe I'm not the only one out there who feels this way.

Rather than having the website author wrap lines at a width that works for the average user or use case (which may only be optimum for a percentage of users or use cases, which may not include me), the user can simply make their browser whatever width they prefer the lines to wrap at. This way, everybody gets to choose what works for them.

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