What do you hate the most about software development?

Brian Beckman frequently derides the difficulties present when one attempts to do something as simple as, adding a textbox control onto a webform. His derision is poited squarely at the amount of technologies one has to know to add a textbox control, get the CSS, databind it etc.

He does have a point, it is a bit of a headache!

One of the things at the top of my hate list is learning third party datagrid controls, coming to think of it, even the winforms one. There is no easy way to learn grids from any of the main vendors i.e. infragistics/component one/devexpress etc, yet their mastery is essential to having a polished application.

By the time one learns that 10000000 settings needed to do a simple thing, your're nothing short of tearing your hair out.

What do you dislike most, and what can be done better to alleviate the problem?

Users. They're always complaining about "not working this" or "formatted my harddrive" that.

Old hardware.

The strangulation of technical creativity ....

Third party data grids are the most egregious examples of abstractions gone terribly wrong and (b) feature creep.

Conflicting requirements are my bane. I hate when users can't make up their minds about something.

JChung2006 wrote:



Conflicting requirements are my bane. I hate when users can't make up their minds about something.

PMI project managers

Somehow I have difficulties to decide between "a brainless PM that would just agree to anything the customers say, no matter how ridiculous" and "being interrupted when concentrating on coding".

Users. I made the program opens to more posibilities, basically more options. It turns out they will use those options to complete their task incorrectly. Andy those annoying complaints "it doesn't work" when there is nothing wrong, just ignorance.

magicalclick wrote:

Users. I made the program opens to more posibilities, basically more options. It turns out they will use those options to complete their task incorrectly. Andy those annoying complaints "it doesn't work" when there is nothing wrong, just ignorance.

management

1. Bad specs
2. Underestimates
3. Overestimates
4. Students as developers
5. Attempts to "save the World"
6. "BIG YELLOW BUTTON" customers (quite large category)
7. IDEs is getting worse, bugier and slower each next release (yep, unfortunately I'm about Visual Studio 2008)
8. "It works enough"

I hate it when I'm stuck on a particular problem or error, and there are no relavant hits on the subject that I can find. It gets worse when the next day, the only relavant hits are my forum posts that I made yesterday.

Users

Changing requirements are high on my list.

Another personal 'favorite' are 'technical' users who proceed to give advice. There's nothing really wrong with that, but when you get advice like "Maybe you should run a debugger", it's just gets my spirit down.

Knowing that Technology X is designed to solve exactly the problem you have, but also knowing that you don't have time to learn technology X, and so having to compromise and make a solution using technology Y.

Oh, and stupid requirements handed down by management (or otherwise) which don't relate to the actual problem the use has, but just some bizarre version of the solution. (e.g. I was given the task of removing boxing and unboxing as far as possible from a website in order to try to improve performance... when profiling showed up a stack of far more important things, and the design had a stack of far more important performance drains.)

Highly coupled code\settings. 

I come across this a lot at the moment: I want to add a unit test, but I have to add dozens of app.config settings that the target code can't live without, or there's no way to separate out the logic from the data-access code so the unit test has to really read from the database, or the security\licensing settings need to be set up, which required reading and decrypting stuff from the database, which requires the correct connection string, or the code uses the remoting context for user rights data and so only works correctly is called on the remoting server ...


Grrr.

Getting wound up just talking about it ...


Herbie