And if we're talking about SMS... 160 characters covers the 7-bit GSM alphabet. Once you enter something outside that (e.g. lower-case greek) you end up in a regional 8-bit encoding and you only get 140 characters. Enter something outside of that (e.g. asian languages) and you're into UTF-16 and you may only have 70 characters (and now you get to explain to your users why emoji with skin tone modifiers count as 4 "letters").
A lot of these questions can be answered easily of you setup some sort of protocol within your application for form validation and error handling.
If everything is ad hoc, then every little change is going to have a thousand implicit question that every developer on the team is going to answer differently.
True, but the point of the article is that some small changes tend to grow into not-so-small changes on closer inspection, and that they take hours instead of minutes.
First you say there are no small changes if quality matters. Then you say it depends on one's knowledge. Either the quality of your communication doesn't matter or you need to make some changes. Please help me to understand which you mean.
I once got exactly the same request and said "sure that will only take a few minutes" . I turned out that half the places where the e-mail appeared was in images. So instead of a simple search-replace job it suddenly turned into either a Photoshop job or a completely redesign non-trivial parts of the site job.
You should take care not to confuse a small amount of work you have to do as part of a change with the scope of the change itself. Changing email addresses implies a lot.
Did you replace all instances across an entire site? Were there any forms on the site using that email address? Is that email address used anywhere else? What about people who are trying to still use the old email address?
I know you're trying to make a point — but I've seen instances where a perceived "simple email change" has actually caused minor service gaps. "One little thing" at best is generally "a handful of little things."
There are plenty of small changes in well-designed systems.
Had this system from the start had a defined limit on the length of inputs, the change would have entailed the changing of a constant, and possibly a rewrite of an error message/instructional oneliner, nothing more.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 50.0 ms ] threadIf everything is ad hoc, then every little change is going to have a thousand implicit question that every developer on the team is going to answer differently.
It was a small change.
There are some small changes.
* An individual's knowledge can be limited based on his technical experience.
* his knowledge about product features
I know you're trying to make a point — but I've seen instances where a perceived "simple email change" has actually caused minor service gaps. "One little thing" at best is generally "a handful of little things."
Had this system from the start had a defined limit on the length of inputs, the change would have entailed the changing of a constant, and possibly a rewrite of an error message/instructional oneliner, nothing more.