Re: Code Annotation of the Week

["Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>]

And yet she got into trouble with someone anyway.  She obviously didn't run it 
past all the right people to avoid that.

In a situation like this one, I would document the message, then distribute a 
"red flag" email all the way up to the product/marketing manager level saying, 
"this is an actual user message in the product, are you all sure you want to do 
this in the product AND document it in the customer/user manual?"  If there's a 
bug/issue tracking system in use, I would also enter it there.

If everybody in the product development food chain really thought there was no 
problem with the idea of displaying a message like that to a customer whose 
product has just melted into slag, I woudn't take it onto myself to decide not 
to document it. But I don't think that particular document would ever make it 
into my portfolio of writing samples.

Gene Kim-Eng


----- Original Message ----- 
From: <quills -at- airmail -dot- net>
> It was a proper error message linked to an error code. That the error
> would not appear because the machine would have melted into slag first
> was irrelevant. She would have gotten into more trouble not documenting
> the error message. As it was, she did talk first to the programmer, who
> didn't see a problem, and then to his first line supervisor, who
> like-wise didn't see a problem.


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