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There are no small changes (2011)

blog.intercom.com

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Re: There are no small changes (2011)

#11
post #9
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

First you say there are no small changes if quality matters. Then you say it depends on one's knowledge. Either the quality of your communication doesn't matter or you need to make some changes. Please help me to understand which you mean.

Re: There are no small changes (2011)

#12
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.

You should take care not to confuse a small amount of work you have to do as part of a change with the scope of the change itself. Changing email addresses implies a lot.

Re: There are no small changes (2011)

#13

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

And if we're talking about SMS... 160 characters covers the 7-bit GSM alphabet. Once you enter something outside that (e.g. lower-case greek) you end up in a regional 8-bit encoding and you only get 140 characters. Enter something outside of that (e.g. asian languages) and you're into UTF-16 and you may only have 70 characters (and now you get to explain to your users why emoji with skin tone modifiers count as 4 "letters").

Re: There are no small changes (2011)

#14
post #2

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

This appears to be a classic "compared to what" scenario. Running through the same exercise for a "large" change, will make this one look small.

Re: There are no small changes (2011)

#15
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.

Did you replace all instances across an entire site? Were there any forms on the site using that email address? Is that email address used anywhere else? What about people who are trying to still use the old email address?

I know you're trying to make a point — but I've seen instances where a perceived "simple email change" has actually caused minor service gaps. "One little thing" at best is generally "a handful of little things."

Re: There are no small changes (2011)

#16
post #10
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.

It's unfortunate that anti-spam strategies introduce so many inefficiencies into our daily lives, from developers to end users.
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