An internal training talk that Michelle D'Netto and I periodically give for Customer Support representatives at Etsy. Introduces advanced Software Quality concepts such as the halting problem, the impossibility of complete testing and the extreme difficulty of discovering all of the significant bugs in one's own software. Winds up by encouraging anyone responsible for online customer experience, to envision themselves as a participant observer embedded in the rapidly-evolving culture of the Web.
5. I can remember the exact
instant when I realized that a
large part of my life... was
going to be spent in finding
mistakes in my own programs
~Maurice Wilkes, 1949
6. Admiral Grace Hopper liked
to tell a story in which a
technician solved a glitch
in the Harvard Mark II
mainframe by pulling an
actual insect out from
between the contacts of
one of its relays
~ The Jargon File
19. Non-source-aware users
tend to report only surface
symptoms; they take their
environment for granted...
~ ESR, “How Many Eyeballs Tame Complexity”, 1997
20. Users never read manuals
Users would save time in the long
term by learning more about the
system. But that's not how people
behave in the real world
~Jakob Nielsen
21. On two occasions
I have been asked...
if you put into the
machine wrong
figures, will the right
answers come Babbage, 1864
~Charles
out?
29. A good editor is
meticulously attentive to detail,
a stickler for technical correctness,
aware of the work as a whole and
sensitive to the expectations of the audience
30. You are doing science
Keep a journal
Take screenshots (use Skitch)
Log IRC, Skype and other chats
Make multiple redundant backups (use DropBox)
Save everything— you won’t know you need it until you need it
31. How many times has this happened?
How many users were affected?
How much time has been lost?
What was the overall cost?