steve kwan user experience designer

The pitfalls of relying on third-party software

(September 26th, 2008 - 12:51PM)

I've been swamped at work lately and incredibly frustrated because of some issues with third-party software.

Software engineers love to building things they can be proud of. There's nothing like slaving away on a project, then upon completion, sitting back and admiring the quality of your work. And, of course, it's even more validating when real users tell you they love your product.

So it's incredibly distressing when, after hundreds of hours of labour, your wonderful product falls apart because of some third party you have no control over.

Like all software, our product relies extensively on programs from third parties. In 2008, reliance on third party software is impossible to avoid. We rely in several pieces of software that are ubiquitous, but also unreliable. I won't mention which pieces of software, although astute readers can probably guess.

In any event, the developer of said third-party software is notorious for breaking things with every new version. Every time this developer announces a new release, we cringe, because we know that new release will break our software.

In many cases, we can repair these problems with several man-weeks of labour. However, this third-party developer has recently released a new version that totally breaks aspects of our software in ways that we may not be able to resolve.

So there's a lesson to be learned here: if you're making software that you actually expect people to use, make sure you don't break anything when you release a new version. Or, as the doctors say when they take the Hippocratic Oath: "First, do no harm."

(And no, I'm not the first person to use the Hippocratic Oath in the context of software engineering - the ACM, among others, has made this comparison before.)

Whether you're a user or an engineer, nobody wants to use a product that might cease to function the way they expect when Update 1.9.19294923 is released.