captain's log Dingens - Made in Germany

How not to add features

So, you added a requested feature to your program, made it fully customizable through the GUI including preview (you even fixed a bug there) and happily released it to the public to satisfy your users. Then, after some weeks (or...

This entry was first published on January 27, 2004, 10:03 PM, CET and categorized as Code.

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So, you added a requested feature to your program, made it fully customizable through the GUI including preview (you even fixed a bug there) and happily released it to the public to satisfy your users.

Then, after some weeks (or months) you receive some feedback on this feature, complaining that - regardless of the settings in the configuration - the default value is used always. So, you open your favourite IDE to check what's going on, tracing through the settings saving code but you don't find anything that could be the reason for the misbehaviour. Then, you check the place where the feature is used, ba-da-bum... While starring at this piece of code in all its glory, you try to remember what you did (and why you didn't used your brain) when you added the feature in question.

The morale of the story is: when you add some new, outstanding feature, make sure it's used/called/whatever in the places where it's supposed to be :)