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I Found An Old, Old, Outlook Form in my new Outlook!

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So I’ve never come across this before:

image

Now, the fact that I’ve never seen it before is not the fact that caught my attention, it’s that the form clearly hasn’t seen the light of day for some time. If you look at the UI/UX design, it seems to be a carry over from a time gone by.

So why is this interesting? Because if you think about it, somewhere buried deep inside all our apps are areas of code that have not been seen for some time. It’s a form buried in a DLL called in this example, perhaps, “ShowConflictMessage()”, where a unit test case has not been written for or has been but dropped off the main test line, and therefore, has never been seen by the most recent ship team.

Functionally it still works, but from a completeness point of view, it’s not consistent with the rest of the application.

And because the use case is so obscure, customers who see it either don’t make the connection that it’s not inline with the rest of the product, or don’t care enough to tell anyone, so zero feedback = zero change.

I wonder how many developers out there, have weird and wonderful little skeletons buried deep in their DLLs? I suppose that’s a good +1 for a high percentage test case coverage.

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Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 05, 2008
    PingBack from http://www.tmao.info/i-found-an-old-old-outlook-form-in-my-new-outlook/

  • Anonymous
    November 05, 2008
    Hey Dave, I think these little skeletons are diminishing more and more these days - especially with the methodologies and tools people are working with. That is of course, IF you bother to use it. One of the totally awesome features i use very, very frequently within Visual Studio 2008 is the Code Coverage feature. I daily go through it to ensure that we have as optimal a coverage as possible on the team i'm currently managing and it's a very simple way to keep these "skeletons" down to a minimum. :)