I was working on fixing an important bug and one of the managers called me to ask how I was getting on. I gave him an update, and he said that he had been informed that a customer had complained about this particular bug – and even had sent an invoice to try to bill us for time lost because of this bug. With their calculations, they wanted £6k in compensation.
I often think about the impact of software bugs. Ideally, the software should always work and help the user do their jobs. A bug will cause frustration and slow the user down. If a company has loads of users that are all impacted by the same bug, then the impact is multiplied. If we end up taking a month to fix it, then the impact is multiplied over that time.
We had no intention of giving into the user’s demands though. We were just fixing the bug as urgently as we could.
Stranger Coding Tings 