Dept of Utterly Useless Error Messages

Mike McCarty Mike.McCarty at sbcglobal.net
Tue May 1 18:04:06 UTC 2007


Aaron Konstam wrote:
> I would hate to put some rationality into what is otherwise a great
> discussion, but have any of you tried to create a system of any size
> with useful (that is useful to every user) error messages. It is pretty
> tough.
> 
> This is one of the reasons as Fred Brooks comments in his book "The
> Mythical Man-Month" it takes 9 times as long to create a software system
> that can be used by people in general than a system that only your use.

Wonderful book.

I recall one time when I created a debugger which could be used
over a network to debug massively parallel processors (MIMD
loosely coupled). I put in the code for the protocol I designed
with no back out, no recovery, just presume all messages get
there, etc. I got it working in about a week. My company wanted
to ship it!

I did a quick estimate, and came up with two months to make the
thing actually usable. I had a very Very VERY hard time getting
management to understand why I couldn't just package it up and
ship it.

I'm sure some of them thought I wasted two months fooling around.

Mike
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