Ambush_Bug
08-31-2001, 11:29 AM
OK, rant time!
Here at my company, we have a program (Record Utility, RU) that is a very key component of our online medical traning software. The RU is the program educators use to grade the performance of the students using our software.
The problem: The RU, when it grades student records, does NOT write the results to an external file for safe keeping. Nope, it writes those changed into ITSELF, into its own Director (it's a Director program) files. Plus, these changed are only written to those files when the user quits the RU.
When the RU crashes, all the work is lost. ALL OF IT. No execptions.
My rant? I have been pointing this out as a major problem with the RU for the last year, and nothing has been done about it! Yeesh... all that has to be done is to make a routine that would intercept the changes to the records and write that to an external file. And this isn't that hard, because those changes are already noted by the RU, just not written until quit-time.
And now they want to build another program that uses the RU as a base, without fixing this first!
AAAAARRRRRRGH!
I love my job! I really do! But this kind of program design makes me physically ill!!! I mean, GEEZ! I've only had one year of 'real' programming classes, and even I know that the RU's file-saving design just sucks.
See, this is what happens when you don't ask the input of tech-support into program design! Those programmers don't have to deal with all the little usuability problems in their programs!
ARRRRRGH, again!
Here at my company, we have a program (Record Utility, RU) that is a very key component of our online medical traning software. The RU is the program educators use to grade the performance of the students using our software.
The problem: The RU, when it grades student records, does NOT write the results to an external file for safe keeping. Nope, it writes those changed into ITSELF, into its own Director (it's a Director program) files. Plus, these changed are only written to those files when the user quits the RU.
When the RU crashes, all the work is lost. ALL OF IT. No execptions.
My rant? I have been pointing this out as a major problem with the RU for the last year, and nothing has been done about it! Yeesh... all that has to be done is to make a routine that would intercept the changes to the records and write that to an external file. And this isn't that hard, because those changes are already noted by the RU, just not written until quit-time.
And now they want to build another program that uses the RU as a base, without fixing this first!
AAAAARRRRRRGH!
I love my job! I really do! But this kind of program design makes me physically ill!!! I mean, GEEZ! I've only had one year of 'real' programming classes, and even I know that the RU's file-saving design just sucks.
See, this is what happens when you don't ask the input of tech-support into program design! Those programmers don't have to deal with all the little usuability problems in their programs!
ARRRRRGH, again!