[Web4lib] RE: library automation software

[Jesse Ephraim]

"With all due respect, I have found in my experience that it is rather
a bad idea to "log every single problem or usability issue, no matter
how small"."

It is useful to log them so that you can prove how many errors you
encountered in the system over a period of time, how many were resolved,
and how long the response and resolution took each time. This gives you
a firm footing for negotiating discounts wih them.

"You need to pick your battles carefully and win every
one.  How? For starters, by being polite but firm, and making it
easier for the vendor to fix the bug (by always filing exact steps to
reproduce the problem) and for them to understand why it is such a big
issue for your library.   Being the customer from hades is not the
best way to achieve that, in my experience."

I am not the " the customer from hades," nor would I want anyone else to
be.  I am always polite.  As you said, you can be both polite and firm
in a conversation.  I am polite in my emails, as well.  When I turn in
support tickets I outline the problem, the steps that I took, any error
messages that popped up, etc. etc.  I used to be on their end of things
(programmer), so I know the value of a detailed explanation of a
computer problem.

"Library systems software is extremely complex.  There are a lot of
reasons for that (some obvious, some not so obvious) which I won't go
into here, but it is."

>From my experience, I would say that it isn't (or shouldn't be) a
complex programming job.  It would be time consuming, obviously, but not
as much of a head-scratcher as game programming.  I would be interested
in hearing about your reasons for stating that it is complex.

- Jesse