Tag: User Complaints

Missing Feature

Cassie: Can I ask you a question?

Me: What is it?

Cassie: A user has complained that a feature has been removed in version 7.5, can you check why? I’ve recreated it on my system.

I check on my system and the feature is there. I look at the code and it is specifically for users in England.

Me:  Is the Region of the organisation set to England?

Cassie: It will be, also I’ve recreated the issue on a second system which is set to Scotland

Me: Yes, this is an England only feature

Cassie: Ah, doesn’t explain why it doesn’t show on the other test system though

Me: Can you check the region?

Cassie: It is Wales

Me: This doesn’t explain why the user doesn’t have the feature though.

Cassie: They are in Scotland

Now I’d like to know if the user has really complained that a feature has been removed. They should never have had it in the first place. I think there has been some miscommunication here, and the user has probably read about the feature and questioned why they don’t have it.

The Invoice

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.