Step 66: Prevent Errors ~ Giles Colborne

This is the 66th Step towards gaining the Programming Enlightenment series. If you didn’t learn the 65th Step, read it.

ANR: Android developers

What is Error in Software?

A software bug is an error, flaw, failure or fault in a computer program or system that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways

Why Prevent Errors?

Error messages are the most critical interactions between the user and the system. This happens when unexpected things happen for the user to be not able to use the system. To make the user happy the system should perform as expected.

How to Prevent Errors?

We cannot prevent all errors, but we can prevent errors by minimizing the occurrences of it. Examples;

• Provide the user with a date input field to choose from rather than the empty text box, which might prevent users from entering some unambiguous date like “July 29, 2019” or worse “29 / 07/ 2019” because it contains extra space.
• Provide the user with a keyboard with only number input, when we are expecting the user to input numeral only.
• Cues or hints from instructions. We can provide certain cues or hints for input fields such as password which require certain characters to be included when creating an account.
• Another way to avoid errors is to offer defaults. For instance, in the case where the user is supposed to enter a date, by default we can have today’s date.

TL;DR Understand how users think, interpret information will help debug the interactions between software and users.

Go to the series.

97 Journey Every Programmer should Accomplish

Go to 65th Step

Step 65: Prefer Domain-Specific Types to Primitives~

Go to the 67th path

Step 67: The Professional Programmer~ Uncle Bob

References:

• 97 things Every Programmer Should Know ~ Git Book
• 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know ~ Paperback
• What is a Software Bug? ~ Wiki