World War 4 Will be Fought by Bugs

Spend some time designing and developing and evolving software and it will feel like you’ve been through a war or two or three. There are never enough hours, never enough coders, and the design is always wrong. But, once you’ve fought through all those hurdles, you can proudly release your product. You can even release your product to the world if it is internet based.

And, that is when the fourth war starts. The bugs come crawling out of the woodwork, or in this case the software. Some of them are really little bugs that cause huge problems and some are really big bugs that cause little problems. Often, squashing one bug causes more, angrier bugs, to attack.

Bugs fighting WW4 on your turf are a big problem for a few reasons: 1) Your Beta users, most who don’t understand software or software development, will eventually grow weary of reporting bugs and may even stop using your product. This is obviously bad. 2) Your team of programmers (some people only have 1) will grow weary of hearing about the complaining Beta users as well as the bugs and might even be happy when the most vocal users stop using the system or reporting bugs. This is obviously worse. 3) While you are in the trenches fixing the bugs, that list of great new functionality that you had shelved until after the initial release is sitting collecting dust. This is really bad – especially if you happened to blog about all the really cool new features that users should be looking forward to using.

Our war is more of a conflict, actually. As it turns out – so far – the bugs we have found have been relatively minor and have been fixed quickly. Our problems exist more on the user interface front. It seems that when many first timers arrive at the web site they have a common question, “What do I do now?” So, as we’re fixing the bugs, we are also trying to make it more obvious as to what, exactly, we intend you to do. Then, you may do as you wish.

But, if you have the patience and want to test out some great new software and give us some feedback and help us squash some bugs and give us some usability tips, register, sign in, and tell us what you think

ETJ.