Jan 3, 2006
Asking the Wrong Question
Upon encountering weird messages in their server logfiles, someone asked “How do you make these error messages stop showing up in the logfiles?”
I think that’s just not the right question to ask.
Error messages are there to help inform the user that there might be something wrong. It’s analogous to somebody screaming “Fire! Fire!” in a quiet neighbourhood. Instead of wondering how to make them stop screaming, it would be better to understand what it is they are screaming about, and why, just in case there actually is a real danger. Don’t you agree?
Average Joe users tend to ignore error messages as if the error messages are created just to make it more complicated and look more techie. Now, I agree that some error messages are cryptic and leave a lot of room for improvements so that they can be useful to average joe users. However, system administrators should be more willing to investigate the error messages further and try to understand what’s happening instead of trying to ignore the messages. At the very least, it wouldn’t hurt to try to paste the error message verbatim in Google.
Follow
That’s why a good programmer should ask a lot of questions to a potential user(s) prior to creating a useful program. In real world, many big price tag projects fail to meet users’ expectations just because the programs cannot be understood starting from mishandling the error handler messages.
“This program experience an error; OK – Cancel”
Sounds familiar?
My fave error message is :
“That’s weird, it works on my machine”
Heh. I kid. I kid.
It’s programmer’s responsibilty to produce polite software.
A good example and handy tools for programmer maybe : Log4Net, Log4J, and Log4r (for .NET, Java, and Ruby respectively).
I’m not quite sure about know about other environment, but I think we can adopt those logging strategies by means, giving level DEBUG, INFO, WARN, etc etc.
I use them religiously, because they simplify my development process, and at the same time giving specific user well-targetted log message.
Not to mention, there are also a lot of Log file reader such as LogFactor5 and Chainsaw. We can easily “embed” them in our product, painlessly.
That’s my stories :)
[...] Why my program isn’t working? By ervan Ronny Haryanto wrote in his blog about how people tend to ask a wrong question when it comes to a technical problem. [...]