

There are No Small Changes  - destraynor
http://contrast.ie/blog/there-are-no-small-changes/

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magicseth
Don't forget that you have to deal with existing messages, which may be longer
than 140, and may be truncated in your new views/layouts, making history
unpredictable.

Don't forget that you're going to want to add attribution to the SMS, so you
really have less than 140 characters.

Oh, and don't forget that you are going to drastically decrease the value of a
percentage of your reviews, which would have previously been long, detailed,
and useful.

The complexity of any modern day advanced system makes even these tiny changes
balloon. The worst part isn't even the expanded work, it's the inability to
predict how long all the ripples will take to fix.

The subtle bugs that got introduced by a "tiny cosmetic change" are more
easily fixed in a web environment, but become pretty devastating when you have
a slower release cycle, or someone gating your releases (like Apple).

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kalleboo
I'm often a part of the design sessions at my work, and all the questions that
look like so much in text are covered in an audio chat in 5-10 minutes, and
for something like adding an error dialog and character counter, another half
an hour turnaround from our designer for the graphics. I'd say any feature
that takes less than an hour to design is a small change.

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bromley
I often hear programmers announce how they did something in minutes that would
have taken me days. I'm going to keep this on hand to cheer me up on such
occasions.

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PaulHoule
Some changes are smaller than others ;-) but it takes familiarity with the
system and wisdom to know the difference.

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smackfu
On the message front, I have learned by now to always ask the client or
marketing for the text up front. Why? Because it doesn't matter what you pick
as the developer, they will want to tweak it because that's the only thing
they have power over. Might as well get it over with first.

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cyrus_
Why should the SMS use case limit the general use case? If someone wants to
submit a review by SMS (really?) then they can deal with being limited to 140
characters. Problem solved.

