I'm curious what change requests, from testers, clients, or managers, programmers have encountered that seemed really simple but were in fact really complicated.
Why is that more complicated than it sounds? Even in the worst case, you can just have the gui trigger shellexecs and read the output of the app. Not to say it's easy, but I'd think the difficulty is about as high as it sounds.
Brian
2009-04-15 18:17:51
Just make the GUI have a text box to type in the command and another text box to display the output. ;)
Brian Ensink
2009-04-15 18:34:07
@Brian, these are the questions that come to my mind: What is the GUI printing on the screen? How is the user entering their selections? What error messages do you print out? Or is all that trivial to do?
JB King
2009-04-15 18:46:17
@Brian^2, it depends on the app, but remember once upon a time there were command line apps that did all sorts of zoomy stuff, via, eg, curses(3)
Charlie Martin
2009-04-15 22:55:12
+1
A:
One thing I've hit was being asked to change a word in the title of a window. However, the title of the window was in fact localized in a library and was shared with several applications. Changing it's title in either title would mean either changing where it grabbed the data (ugly and inconsistent with the rest of the code), changing the dll (will impact other software), or adding a hard-coded fix (hacky).
Brian
2009-04-15 18:16:15
hehe... when my company rolled out a new version of our webapp, we actually had customers complain that it looked too much like a real desktop app.
rmeador
2009-04-15 18:25:50
+1
A:
"I'd like to use Oracle instead of SQLServer for the database."
tvanfosson
2009-04-15 18:19:20
+1
A:
"can you make it bigger?" in reference to the sizing of radio buttons.. back before CSS
NoCarrier
2009-04-15 18:26:42
+4
A:
Back in my college days I worked on a side project for a client. It was a medium sized Win32 desktop application to do some 2D diagramming and every step of the way and every demo was great. The client liked it. Finally, I was ready to deliver it and be done when they asked if I could just make it run on the web first.
Classic "missing-requirement-kills-project" scenario.
Brian Ensink
2009-04-15 18:32:39