Re: Template open/save behavior

Hi CyberTaz:

I love a good controversy :-)

On 17/2/06 10:57 PM, in article C01B246D.DCB8%onlygeneraltaz1@xxxxxxxxxxxx,
"CyberTaz" <onlygeneraltaz1@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

John - Does the "industry" _not_ make a distinction between Custom-Designed
and Pre-packaged software? If it does, much of what you relate makes far
more sense. If the software is specifically written to address expressed
customer needs and fails to do so perhaps 'buggy' is appropriate, no matter
how well written.

I am speaking from the standpoint of Software Engineering. That's the
"industry" I am in.

The distinction you refer to is made by the "Legal" industry. A computer
company such as Microsoft obviously has both kinds of industries within its
corporation.

Back in the days when ALL software was "bespoke" (i.e. Custom-designed for a
single customer) then there was no wiggle room at all.

With the advent of "shrink-wrap" software, the lawyers have made
increasingly wordy and incomprehensible efforts to extricate themselves from
the "Fitness for Purpose" provisions of the "Merchantability" test inherent
in the majority of the worlds consumer-protection legal systems.

I think most of us long since lost patience with the legal sophistry that
goes on in this space. The customer should have the opportunity to satisfy
themselves of the software's "fitness for purpose" before purchase. Which
means the vendor should provide a complete and accurate description of the
functionality of the product, available to the customer before purchase.

They don't.

From the inside, time and again, I bang my head against this nonsense:
whenever I try to add into the user documentation a clear statement that the
product won't do some expected function, it gets taken out. "We never
document what it *won't* do..."

OTOH, if the software is written for the general market and _works as
intended_ I don't see how that can be declared a bug simply because any one
user doesn't like the way it works.

That's not quite what I was saying :-) A "bug" is when the product won't DO
what the customer requires. When we start to consider that the customer
doesn't like the WAY the product does the requirement, we get several more
layers of complexity into the discussion before we can say definitively
whether or not we have a "bug". Where I work, "I don't 'like' it" is not
sufficient reason to change it. We have to be able to point to a user
requirement that is not satisfied unless we change it :-)

I'd be more tempted to call it a bad decision on the part of the purchaser.
Further, my experience has been that the software industry (in general) is
not sufficiently benevolent as to assume responsibility for the user's
inappropriate choice.

The software industry, in general, is insufficiently benevolent to assume
responsibility for *anyone's* inappropriate choices, including its own. It
is notorious for telling lies (by omission or commission) to make it almost
impossible for users to get sufficient accurate information to make an
appropriate choice. They call it "marketing" :-)

However, people working to make software deal in facts: science,
engineering, process, procedure... We're quite clear -- If it does what the
user requires, it's good. Anything else is a bug, and any further
discussion is centred on how the bug happened.

In the case that began this discussion: Microsoft claims that Microsoft
Word enables you to "use templates". It does NOT define what it "means" by
'use templates'. However, Microsoft DOES say that Word will work on both PC
and Mac. It does NOT go on to say that "on the Mac, you won't be able to
use templates the way you can on the PC. If you are on a network, you will
find templates almost impossible to use for their intended purpose."

It's open to the user to conclude that on the Mac you can use templates just
the same way as you can on the PC. You can't. And that's a bug.

If referring exclusively to custom software, fine, but any EULA I've ever
read for 'shrink-wrap' software explicitly states otherwise... The user is
paying for the license to *use* the software & agreeing to any number of
restrictions that the developers *would not* have any legal right to impose
unless they retained ownership to the software.

Sure. But now you're discussing a different thing. You're talking about a
mechanism to ensure that the vendor escapes responsibility for the presence
of bugs in its product. We all know they can do that. That's not my point.

My point is "how do we make good software"? We understand the customer's
requirements -- which is not as easy as it might sound; then we try to make
what the customer wanted. Which is also not as easy as it sounds.

When we fail (which is a high percentage of the time) we must first be big
and brave and admit we have a bug. Then we can sit down and work out how
the bug happened, and hopefully, not let it happen again...

Now: Let me say something nice :-) Microsoft is a software company.
Relatively unusual in the industry, Microsoft is a software company that
doesn't do "anything else" except make software. Which means it takes a
fairly pure stance on this issue.

I am a Microsoft MVP. One of the reasons the MVP program exists at all is
due to Microsoft's efforts to better understand its customer requirements.
Microsoft relies on me among others to tell it when they miss the mark. Not
many other companies out there collect a bunch of users who pay for its
products to fly to Headquarters once a year to tell it where it went wrong.

Microsoft does :-)

Cheers :-)

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <john@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

.

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