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writing good error messages is hard* and a potential security issue if it leads to information leakage. for this reason in my team (not jira) we opt for "sorry,
by stefs 5y ago
writing good error messages is hard* and a potential security issue if it leads to information leakage. for this reason in my team (not jira) we opt for "sorry, something is wrong" per default in the UI (with maybe the real error message in the logs) and only provide the real message if deemed necessary.
* and good developers aren't necessarily good writers
- justin_oaks 5y agoYes, it is hard to write a good error message. Sometimes it's not necessary to write a good error message if you can provide something that the user can Google or at least something that's useful to someone who can investigate further. For example, the old "Error occurred, check the logs" is useful because it tells me that there is info in the logs. It's even better if it says "Error 4824 occurred, check the logs" because it gives me an error code to try to look up. Better yet is "Error 4824 occurred, check the foobar-error.log file for transaction_id nv3kd32dx9" which also gives you which error log to check AND gives you a unique ID to grep for. Sadly, I've NEVER seen that type of error message in any software.