Wow, self-documenting applications, now that sure is a mouthful. Back in the day, when I first started my journey down the IT road, we were always told to write self-documenting code. Meaning use white space, meaningful variable names, comments blocks and so on. Well, let's face it that may help the developer who follows you, but what about the poor user. End-user documentation represents the most important part of an application, and in most cases its the first thing that falls off of the radar. You may have a great application, but if you users do not have a clue on how to use it, they will not make it a part of their daily life. So how are these problems solved? Well, today I am going to focus on one aspect of this problem. How do users find about bugs in your application? Come on, no one is prefect every developer in the back of their mind knows about one or two bugs that they release in the wild. Hopefully those bugs are recorded in a bug tracking system like bugzilla or mantis. We are actually using Mantis for a number of the projects in my group. Its very full features and easy to use. The big problem with the application is its a great repository of bugs, but with no easy mechanism to get something to the user. The days of putting up web pages listing known bugs are gone. Come on people, no one really updates those pages. Our fantastic application needs a real-time peek into all of the bugs that are active. That way our users have an idea of what they can expect to encounter. Along those lines, they also need an easy to use form by which they can submit new bugs. Sending to email to help desk is passe. If user's problem is with WebMail and they can't send mail, how are they expected to submit a bug report? OK, back to the topic, mantis, bugs and how to get things out to the user. Well, I was thinking about this last evening and its something I'm going to try. Mantis and a number of the other bug tracking tools use mysql as a back-end. So my idea is to write a web-based application that pulls data from the database real-time, formats it and displays it to the user. That way, the user will have an idea of what bugs have been submitted and where they are in the whole scheme of things. That has a number of benefits:
- Users at a glance will have an idea of what to expect when they use the application.
- Users will be more inclined to submit new bugs. If the user has no idea what bugs already exist in a an application they are less apt to submit new ones. This is a very true statement.
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