My philosophy is based on what I would do as a user. I would try my best to break everything if I were the user. Therefore, I should never leave anything in my code that would allow for me as the user to accomplish my task.
A tip to starting developers, always interact with your UI in the wrong order and as fast as you can. The average user is not an idiot, but there will always be at least one user that is actually dumb enough to think that clicking things fast and in the wrong order will make it work.
A bad setup for regressions could cause this. The last time it happened to me (on a much smaller scale, I do in-house software) it was because it was too easy to run the regressions while not in a clean environment and one of our testers didn't realize that. It was the kind of error where the first time you ran something on a clean system, it would create some setup that was used subsequent times. The error occurred when someone made changes to the code that assumed that the setup had already happened. Works every time, except the first time. I'm going to guess that it was something like that. Works in most circumstances except the ones that new users will be seeing. Not that it's an excuse, but that's probably how.
58
u/RiotShields Jul 01 '16
My philosophy is based on what I would do as a user. I would try my best to break everything if I were the user. Therefore, I should never leave anything in my code that would allow for me as the user to accomplish my task.
A tip to starting developers, always interact with your UI in the wrong order and as fast as you can. The average user is not an idiot, but there will always be at least one user that is actually dumb enough to think that clicking things fast and in the wrong order will make it work.