NewInstance

In the last three weeks I am following the production set-up of a big enterprise system and the client ran function acceptance tests on the platform. Our part of the system implemented many rpc calls to the rest of the system, but it is also the front-end console used by “human-users”.
Being a new customized branch, we got many reports for improvement and bugs. I found some request a little bit funny (I don’t say that they are not reasonable: just a bit funny.

Here my favourites ones (my comments in italic):

1. bug (priority: High): there is no limitation on password fields (you can insert any string, of any length, of any case, and with any special character); either the user name as the password are case sensitive but there’s no warning about it given to the user. Response: Uh!? Why should we limit passwords character sets?!!?! You should use mixed case password with special chars to have a good password difficult to guess.
2. bug (priority: Very High): The generation of ${parent-object} fails when generating 1.000.000 of ${child-objects} and the console reports OutOfMemoryError.Solution: don’t do that. This application was not designed to generate a complex graph of 1.000.000 of objects… so we’ll limit the number of possible ${child-objects} respecting production needs. (There was also some performance bottlenecks that we are addressing to make very big ${parent-objects} handling possible, and fast enough.)
3. bug (priority: Very High): due to bug #2, the application runs slow!
4. bug (priority: High): the fields “PIN length” gives an error “PIN length must be 12..20″ when I insert “123456789012″. Notice that is responsibility of our application to generate the digits and in this field the user has only to put the length! not the PIN itself…
5. bug (priority: Low): when a user is logged, and the administrator change his “Full Name” the user continues to see the old “Full Name”. The “Full Name” is updated only after he logs out then logs-in.
6. improvement (priority: Low): the button “Aggiorna” (means “Update” in Italian) must be changed to “Save” as it can be confused with the “Aggiorna” button of the browser (“Aggiorna” is also the label of the “Reload” button in the browser).
7. bug (priority: Low): the command line utility “Xyz” gives this error when executed with JRE 1.2 (ClassNotFoundError), it should say to the user which version is required, and specify how to run the utility with older JVMs. This is possible, but the thing is: we said you need JRE 1.4 or better

Obviously, we had also real bugs, but this is not funny enough for this post ;-)