Did I write this before? I can’t recall, but it came to mind today at work in a conversation I was having. From a user’s perspective, whether you intended the code that way or not, whether it is a “bug” (I didn’t intend it to do that and you don’t like it) or an “enhancement” (I did intend that, but you don’t like it), doesn’t matter.
The distinction we make on this topic is one of vanity. We want to somehow feel better for having done as we were told and yet not satisfied our customer. How is it ok to just be the order taker, to claim that we have done as asked, and that the change requested is an “enhancement”? In effect, “this is not my fault.”
It is your fault. It is OUR fault. We are one company, one organization, with a single customer (or group of customers, it doesn’t really matter) to serve. If we fail to serve that market, whether it is through coding incompetence (bugs) or failure to recognize the need (enhancements) doesn’t matter.
What matters is that we aren’t meeting their need, and beyond that, the distinction we make between bug and enhancement is only a small piece of information in the search for a preventable root cause. This isn’t a hard concept to grasp, yet we seem to struggle with it all the time.
If the customer doesn’t like it, it doesn’t matter the goodness of our intention. It must be remedied. The customer does not care how the undesirable behavior was introduced, just that it exists at all.
