I have just had another encounter with a piece of software that I manage on our network. I’m not going to name it as I feel that would be unprofessional.
Just to set the record straight, I am by no means a fantastic developer, and I admit to ‘bodging’ things every now and then. However, when I’m doing them, it is not a commercial piece of software costing £1500 pa.
The management interface is appalling and only updates after you close and reopen the program. Bearing in mind we have to set a lot of information up in here for the rest of the program to work, it is very time consuming to have to keep closing and re-opening the program.
I could however live with a bad management interface, if the end user interface worked perfectly. But no. Both are as bad. The user cannot tell the options that they have selected, it does not automatically update information, the settings, once created and used once, cannot be removed or deleted. And the best error of all, is when a user puts an apostrophe in the comments box. SQL throws an error back when it writes to the database.
We have just had the latest version, boasting a host of new features. Only to find that this host of new features doesn’t actually work too well.
It just seems like they have written software, marketed it as a fantastic product, but then failed to back this up with the fantastic product.
As I said, I am not a professional programmer. I do some programming both for my work and in my spare time, and usually only encounter so many problems when doing the initial testing of a program.
Worst bit of it all – it is never the company that wrote the software that gets it in the neck. It is always us lowly technicians who have to deal with the aggravated users when it doesn’t work.
