I finally found a coop! It's great... I'm working in QA at a small company in Victoria. It's definately been an interesting first week, it's my first experience in QA and I have to say I've learned a fair bit.
The first thing that I would like to point out though.... Developers need to learn to write Error Messages! For all of you who haven't taken SENG310 at UVic you need to think about your user! Especially when the users are not developers themselves. They have no idea what a “Null pointer reference error” is.... and they don't care that the error came from “someNewClass.System.SomethingElse()”.
Shneiderman’s guidelines for error messages
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•Be courteous
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Avoid using terms like FATAL, INVALID, BAD, ERROR, ILLEGAL
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•Audio warnings
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•Avoid UPPERCASE and code numbers
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•Messages should be precise rather than vague
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•Provide context-sensitive help
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Provide multi-level messages
Another note... not every error needs to send the user to his/her System Administrator. Many times the Sys Admin has a say in which products are bought... and I don't think you'll get his/her vote that way. Oh and I think patronizing error messages are out as well...