No good deed ever goes without bug reports.

[sistawendy]

Remember how I deployed a year's worth of off-and-on work on the Lambert House DB? Well, Murphy's Law is made of iron, and things went wrong. In chronological order:

• Windows Startup item that neither I nor the IT guy knew existed, thereby making it likely that volunteers would put data in the wrong DB. Luckily, the director caught this before the volunteers did. Time to fix (by IT guy): 5 minutes.
• Broken compatibility between Access versions nuked some important functionality and was not caught testing. Time to fix: 30 minutes.
• Rank screwup on my part leading to misleading GUI. Time to fix: 15 minutes.
• Need to add two columns to a table to match the paper forms, with GUI elements to go with them. Estimated time to fix: 30 minutes.
• The director is too old to read greyed-out text. Time to fix: Sorry. Access won't let me.
• Defaults, more validation, GUI nits. Estimated time to fix: 60 minutes.

Because Microsoft doesn't sell Access for Macintosh and the director needs his box, I can't work until after 9:30 PM. Ungh.

Comments

[ximinez]

A couple of hours worth of bugs for a first release of a volunteer project? That's amazingly good.

[staxxy.livejournal.com]

this is my thinking as well!

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

I ♥ my volunteer gig. I'm already working on v2: MySQL back end, Ruby/Sinatra web front end. Lower cost, stronger security, auditing, more developers available, portability, more flexibility.