3 ms·
There are no small changes (2011)
- ankit84 9y agoBeing as engineers or manager, we often over look this aspect. If quality is important, nothing is a small change.
- rileymat2 9y agoThis appears to be a classic "compared to what" scenario. Running through the same exercise for a "large" change, will make this one look small.
- bluepnume 9y agoNot to mention "Does my character-counter work with unicode?"
- kalleboo 9y agoAnd if we're talking about SMS... 160 characters covers the 7-bit GSM alphabet. Once you enter something outside that (e.g. lower-case greek) you end up in a regional 8-bit encoding and you only get 140 characters. Enter something outside of that (e.g. asian languages) and you're into UTF-16 and you may only have 70 characters (and now you get to explain to your users why emoji with skin tone modifiers count as 4 "letters").
- hasenj 9y agoA lot of these questions can be answered easily of you setup some sort of protocol within your application for form validation and error handling. If everything is ad hoc, then every little change is going to have a thousand implicit question that every developer on the team is going to answer differently.
- IChrisI 9y agoI once updated a client's email address on a site to be their new one. It was a small change. There are some small changes.
- janwillemb 9y agoTrue, but the point of the article is that some small changes tend to grow into not-so-small changes on closer inspection, and that they take hours instead of minutes.
- ankit84 9y agoSaying a "issue is small", depends on someone's knowledge. * An individual's knowledge can be limited based on his technical experience. * his knowledge about product features
- jiminycrickit 9y agoFirst you say there are no small changes if quality matters. Then you say it depends on one's knowledge. Either the quality of your communication doesn't matter or you need to make some changes. Please help me to understand which you mean.
- dagw 9y agoI once got exactly the same request and said "sure that will only take a few minutes" . I turned out that half the places where the e-mail appeared was in images. So instead of a simple search-replace job it suddenly turned into either a Photoshop job or a completely redesign non-trivial parts of the site job.
- iplaw 9y agoIt's unfortunate that anti-spam strategies introduce so many inefficiencies into our daily lives, from developers to end users.
- FroshKiller 9y agoYou should take care not to confuse a small amount of work you have to do as part of a change with the scope of the change itself. Changing email addresses implies a lot.
- accountyaccount 9y ago
- drailing 9y agoFirst question should be: can we only receive SMS reviews if we have a 140 character limit? Is it a problem for a SMS if there is no limit?
- interfixus 9y agoThere are plenty of small changes in well-designed systems. Had this system from the start had a defined limit on the length of inputs, the change would have entailed the changing of a constant, and possibly a rewrite of an error message/instructional oneliner, nothing more.