
There are no small changes (2011) - ankit84
https://blog.intercom.com/there-are-no-small-changes/
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ankit84
Being as engineers or manager, we often over look this aspect. If quality is
important, nothing is a small change.

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rileymat2
This appears to be a classic "compared to what" scenario. Running through the
same exercise for a "large" change, will make this one look small.

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interfixus
There are plenty of small changes in well-designed systems.

Had this system from the start had a defined limit on the length of inputs,
the change would have entailed the changing of a constant, and possibly a
rewrite of an error message/instructional oneliner, nothing more.

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IChrisI
I once updated a client's email address on a site to be their new one.

It was a small change.

There are some small changes.

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dagw
I once got exactly the same request and said "sure that will only take a few
minutes" . I turned out that half the places where the e-mail appeared was in
images. So instead of a simple search-replace job it suddenly turned into
either a Photoshop job or a completely redesign non-trivial parts of the site
job.

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iplaw
It's unfortunate that anti-spam strategies introduce so many inefficiencies
into our daily lives, from developers to end users.

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bluepnume
Not to mention "Does my character-counter work with unicode?"

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kalleboo
And if we're talking about SMS... 160 characters covers the 7-bit GSM
alphabet. Once you enter something outside that (e.g. lower-case greek) you
end up in a regional 8-bit encoding and you only get 140 characters. Enter
something outside of that (e.g. asian languages) and you're into UTF-16 and
you may only have 70 characters (and now you get to explain to your users why
emoji with skin tone modifiers count as 4 "letters").

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drailing
First question should be: can we only receive SMS reviews if we have a 140
character limit? Is it a problem for a SMS if there is no limit?

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hasenj
A lot of these questions can be answered easily of you setup some sort of
protocol within your application for form validation and error handling.

If everything is ad hoc, then every little change is going to have a thousand
implicit question that every developer on the team is going to answer
differently.

