Validate the input

One of the things that we seemed to have been doing with AudioMan is checking the inputs for functions too much. This might have been a lot of redundant checks, and maybe made the software sighly slower, but I think that this is a good thing. I was talking to my dad the other day about some software that he has to deal with. It's an app written in VB that stores the data in a database, and I don't really have a high opinion of it. Neither does my dad.

One of the things that we was telling me yesterday is about some (all actually) of the input fields. Lets say they allow you to enter in 30 characters. You hit submit. You get a database error. huh? What did you do wrong? Well, max allowed field in the DB is 15. So, they don't do any checking for things like that. I am sure that they don't look for special characters (ctrl-D, ...) or things like that. He was also telling me about how they have double quotes " in the database, but that screws things up because that's a special character for SQL (if I remember correctly). Yikes.

So, your software might work correctly with "good data", but if you don't even check with for bad data, you'll end up having to deal with it no matter what. This is really bad. There are other horror stories, but this is all about checking out the input. I'd give the company some leeway about this, but they are on release 7. There is no excuse for that. They are giving software a bad name, but that is where I think the industry is coming from right now. It's our job to change that.

Listening to: Quartetto Gelato - Espagna Capriccioso