Marc Antony Vose wrote:
You are going to make mistakes. Lots of them. And, you'll have
situations where to get to problem x, you might need to go through
steps a, b and c to get there, which takes time and is mind-numbingly
boring.
So, so true...
when it comes to e-commerce, it has to work; bugs are not acceptable
because you're dealing with people's private data and all that, and
customers will get nasty when things don't work right.
Specially if there's any kind of time constrain. For example, I am
building a small payroll application for a client. Unexpected (or
overlooked) bugs = people don't get paid in time = epic fail.
If one can avoid having to deal with user's sensitive data (credit card,
etc) by using a third-party service like paypal and avoid the possible
nightmares, why not do it?
(For example, I decided to drop Zen Cart into a project once circa
2006 or so. It's basically a steaming pile, as I discovered, but
that's beside the point.
Good to know ;-)
They had an authorize.net module, which it turned out after a ton of
testing had a bug in it with respect to error reporting. This couldn't
be ignored; I had to go into the module and fix it. So, if you're
using Drupal, and something in Drupal or some third-party module
doesn't work like it should, you need to be prepared to go in there
and get your hands dirty if necessary.)
Bingo. That's why CMSs can be more problematic than helpful, specially
when dealing with clueless clients.
1. CMS vendors promise the world: innumerable "cool" features, "ease of
use", etc..
2. Client thinks: "wow.. this web stuff is getting so easy. I can have
my unbelievably complex website done in about a couple of days work!"
3. Developers' work misunderstood and unappreciated.
So, budget for testing. Whatever time you think you'll spend
building; add on another 200% for the back and forth, the testing, the
unexpected client requests, etc. and so on. If you can swing it, pay
your most anal-retentive friend or perhaps a professional tester some
money to test things for you; just like it's very hard to edit your
own writing, it's often very difficult to spot bugs in a system you
are building, because you naturally tend to fall into certain usage
patterns that don't test everything.
Oh, and remember to budget for testing. Did I mention that?
There was a recent episode of the Boagworld podcast where they go into
detail with suggestions on how to run a testing session. Well worth a
listen.
-André
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