Rank: Administration
Groups: Administration
Joined: 1/25/2008
Posts: 11
Points: -255
Location: Oceanside, CA
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I coined the phrase "Expectational Parallax" a couple of weeks ago (surely on a meteoric rise to ubiquity, even as I type this) in reference to something that is both the bane of the software industry, and it's raison d'etra, at the same time: the end-user.
A user of an app I developed was sniveling loud and long to management about broken features and worthless updates wasting his time. Of course he couldn't be bothered to use the built-in mechanism to send diagnostic info to me, so getting to the bottom of it took much longer than it should've.
In the end we found that, though indeed the app wasn't doing what he expected, the reason for that was his expectations were insane! He didn't have a clue as to actual design goals, he just dreamed up some fanciful crap, and then assumed the code was broken.
So thus the elite new term -- feel free to use it in whatever technical writings you may author (but don't forget it all started here!)
As for its namesake, this forum, it's a place to share horror stories brought about by end-users talking out their asses... or anything similar you might think will fit... Anything in tribute to the inescapable fact that, the difference between perfect software and imperfect software, is that the latter has users.
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