Product Names

Let’s say that the company I work for is “ACME” (classic fake company name). Our existing product is called “ACME Pro”, and our upcoming product is ACME-One. 

In the past, we have had inconsistent branding, with the company name written as ACME, Acme, and acme. We have tried to be more consistent and have discussed the importance that the new product is only ever gonna be “ACME-One” and the hyphen is very important.

Colin has been doing some work in ACME Pro, but it has some kind of integration with ACME-One. He had a database change and was populating the new table with values “Acme Pro” and “ACME One”.

I point out that the casing is wrong with the first product, and he has missed the important hyphen in the second product.

It would take him a few seconds to change it, whereas leaving it like that means it will probably be wrong for a long time and annoy pedantic/perfectionist people like me.

He replies “this isn’t user facing text, so it is not an issue”.

He really doesn’t care about quality. Also, one of the database columns is literally called DisplayName. Who is the text displayed to? If it isn’t an actual end user, it’s going to be an employee using some kind of configuration tool; and that is still a type of user. 

It’s also annoying for writing SQL queries, because you may type “where DisplayName = “ACME-One” but it won’t find it because the stored data is missing the hyphen. So you have to be aware of the misspelling in order for data to be returned.