Aug
22Can’t see wood for trees, a bug fix
Tags : Software Posted in: Tech Talk
G, thats an expression we use in the UK “Can’t see wood for trees” meaning erm, well that were too close to something to see it. Hidden in plain sight.
Well I got denise (my wife) to test MDBSecure for me at the weekend.
I was looking through her notes at the start of the week and making some small fixes.
When I noticed what seemed to be a file permissions problem on a shared folder.
When I looked into the problem further I discovered the permissions were fine.
However, I wasn’t deleting the file, this occured after the file save dialog was shown.
I guess when i firt wrote the code I figured that the OS dialog would delete the file for me.
So the moral of the story is don’t assume bug reports are due to the user machines or conifguration.
I just wonder how many sales I’ve lost through this 
by JM
Well, I can make 3 points in response:
1. Never assume a problem is the user’s fault. I think a lot of technical people have this tendency but there’s alsmost always a core of truth in a problem reported by a user.
2. If it’s taken you a long time to uncover the problem then don’t worry too much; it’s likely your users will have experienced this very infrequently too.
3. I’m amazed your wife can help you with testing. If I ask mine to do anything, I have to go and wake her up 30 minutes later and give her a strong coffee!
Well denise, can break a pc just by looking at it.
Shes blew up a couple of pcs, think static electric is attracted to her.
Seriously, although its true…
She seems to do really stupid things which and say stuff that I’d never think of.
Shes tested for me in the past. Shes always quite thorough, she tends to glaze over when I talk about my progs and she doesn’t know much about them. So shes almost like a new user.
She tends to get stuff with a bug or serious error after 2 minutes, so it never gets to 30 minutes.