Along those lines...

A few years ago, a team at my company was developing a client-server
application.  (I wasn't on that project team, so I can afford to be critical.
:-)  It ran partly on a mainframe, partly on an NT server, and partly on the
user's PC.  The manager in charge of this project was making trips around the
company to demonstrate the new application to some of the prospective users.  At
one point he complained that his laptop kept running out of disk space.  A
member of the PC maintenance team found that he had two complete copies of a
(very large) commercial program installed.  The manager said that he needed this
software because it was required for the new application he was demonstrating.
When asked why he needed two copies, he said one was the current version and one
was an older version.  He used the new version for development, but needed the
older version for doing demos because the demo didn't work properly under the
new version.  It was pointed out that the users all had the new version, and he
said that was why he had to carry the old one with him.  If he tried to demo the
new application on the user's machines, it wouldn't work!  It was obvious that
he didn't care whether the users got a working product, as long as his demo made
him look good.

It didn't help him, though.  The consensus of the users, after seeing the demo,
was that the application was not even close to what they wanted and would
require massive changes to make it acceptable.  Ultimately the whole project was
scrapped.  Sometimes there *is* justice in the world. :-)

Wayne




"Johnson, Tracy" <[log in to unmask]> on 06/27/2000 08:06:59 AM

Please respond to "Johnson, Tracy" <[log in to unmask]>

To:   [log in to unmask]
cc:    (bcc: Wayne Brown/Corporate/Altec)

Subject:  Re: [HP3000-L] MPE iX FOS and Network Services (NS/3000)



Well isn't THAT an age old programmer problem!

Programmers with extra privileges the users don't have.
Then they wonder why it works for them and not the user.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Doug Becker [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>
> It is easy to see how this situation might develop. The HP
> developers and testers had full access to NS while they were
> developing FOS products and would not have discovered the
> problem without turning off NS. It was only a customer
> working on what might be considered the leading edge of
> e-commerce tools without NS that would have discovered the problem.