F@ck right off...

Music: The Smashing Pumpkins - Disarm

I posted this initially, and have now re-read it. What a horrible entry... time for some editing.

I asked about a new feature in the application which allows a different page to be opened, I first read about it in the features document that was sent to me this morning and I had just gotten an installation working so I figured I'd check it out:

Me: Where do you set this? (After 10 minutes I found it on my own)

Me: So the setting says "Use the first" of the items in the list, where does it get the first one from?
Dev: From the list of features.
Me: But if the admin can set them up, and the user can set them up.
Dev: You'll have to test it because we don't know.

This means they don't care how its done, nor do they care about the usability or wording.

I thought about it for a few minutes and realized which would be first.

Me: Ok, so its the admin.

I quickly realize that there are two listings in where the Administrator can set the order, when its created and when its assigned to a user.

Me: Which list is it using? Because there are lots of inconsistencies.
Dev: I don't know, probably from the group. (Which makes sense)

Now I get to the hard questions:

Me: Whats the point of it? I mean if you have a list of 15 of these things that the admin just added and suddenly realized that things were wrong and you have to use the first one... you need to remove them all and add them all back in to have the proper order, because you didn't put in any mechanism to move these items up and down in the list*. So someone needs to spend a good 15 minutes getting this sorted out for each of the user groups (because the groups can have a different set of these items.)
Dev: That wasn't a requirement.
Me: So we're putting out a piece of functionality that development doesn't know the order of, where a user has no easy way of creating and maintaining this information? And no one thought of making it easier to use?
Dev: Its going to be like that in the next version in September.

Developers are always so hopeful, the version that I'm testing now is going on 2 months late, which means the September launch is already pushed back to October.

Me: So, why didn't we take the initiative to fix this as we were developing it?
Dev: I don't know. I'll file a defect.

Thats code for it'll get fixed at some point, but not anytime soon.
I hate it when shit like that happens. Why would you release something like that?

Think of it like this, you make a list on a piece of paper and you want to change the order. But you wrote it in marker, now you have to redo the entire list again on a new piece of paper. Its a waste really.

* This isn't the first time they've done that.