Misbehaving Data
AKA: The fallacies of assumption
AKA: Damn users not dong what they are supposed to do!
I’m working on an app that attributes various roles to users on a given document. EG: user A authored document B. User C is a stakeholder, but not an author, on document B, etc.
Now the assumption, which I was told should be reliable (famous last words?), was that all employees had unique email addresses. So I built the db around that assumption.
Now it turns out that quite a few users, for whatever reason, just haven’t gotten around to applying for their own email addresses, and share an email address with various people in the department. Or better still, IT has gone and allowed generic email addresses to be set up which go to several recipients.
How the hell am I supposed to build a robust app if the bloody users don’t do what they are supposed to? Don’t they know about the procedures?
pimaster said,
April 4, 2008 @ 3:15 pm
I’ve seen several applications fail when they use an email address as a user id.
People get married. Name changes so their email changes as well.
Companies merge and primary emails change.
Hopefully your “users” have some other identifier so you can just change the way you log in and are identified.
I feel you pain.
Lucien said,
April 4, 2008 @ 3:58 pm
The saddest part is that I *knew* it was a stupid idea, but I allowed myself to be convinced by somebody else, who knows the byzantine systems here better than I, that it would be okay. Lesson learnt: believe in your own judgment.