[PLUG] CUPS, Commentary on Crappy UI

chris linux at chrisroberts.org
Tue Mar 23 08:22:02 UTC 2004


on the whole "developers debugging their own program" topic. it is not 
possible for a developer to debug their own program well. for that matter, it 
is not possible for a developer to do a very good job debugging a program 
they know well. this has nothing to do with the intellegence of the 
developer. it has to do with the fact that the developer knows what the 
program is supposed to do, and how to make it do the things that it is 
supposed to do. since they are predisposed to this information, doing the 
things that the system aren't able to handle never come into perspective 
because knowing how the system works, there would be no reason to do that, 
since it should do nothing. 

i guess the point is, i just wanted to back up Rich in saying that you always 
want a third party to test and try and break your application. and finding a 
regular user as opposed to a fellow developer is a plus as they will be more 
likely to do the random things that are likely to cause problems.

chris

On Monday 22 March 2004 06:58 pm, Rich Shepard wrote:
> On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, Bill Spears wrote:
> > I came across these links to commentaries by Eric Raymond about his
> > similar experience with CUPS in which he says that we will have to make
> > software much more discoverable and transparent if we want it to be
> > widely used.
>
>   It's too bad that it takes someone of ESR's stature to get a positive
> response from folks like those at Easy Software. I went through the same
> nonsense a few years ago. But, I discovered that configuring CUPS through
> the command line interface didn't work; I _had_ to use the BUI to do the
> job.
>
>   This is, unfortunately, another validation of why developers should never
> write documentation. They cannot see the software from the naive users'
> perspective. In the late 80s I wrote a database program and asked a friend
> at work to give it a usability test for me. He crashed it almost
> immediately! I was watching at the time and asked him why he did what he
> did. He shrugged and said it seemed like a fun thing to try. Well, with
> Fred's help I blocked all the possible wrong things a user could do that
> didn't even occur to me. It was a very good lesson, though.
>
> Rich




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