Badly made software

[chris128]

I encountered some software today that was so badly made that it just made me laugh, and I wondered what other horror stories people have encountered

I'll explain all of the things that were wrong with this software I had to install today (some arent that bad but some are terrible, and all of them combined just make it one of the worst commercial programs I've ever seen)


--- The installer only created an item in the Start Menu for the user that actually installed it, despite the program installing to Program Files.

--- Once installed, there is no obvious way to uninstall it as there is no entry in Add/Remove Programs and no uninstaller in the Program Files directory that it was installed to. I found the only way I could uninstall it was to run the original setup file again and it then gave me the option to remove.

--- The application stores all of its data in Program Files, meaning any non admin user cannot use it. What is even worse is that there is no indication to a normal user that an error has occurred when they try to save something in it - it all looks like it worked fine but just the next time they come to use it they find that none of the data they entered is there!

--- The Description and File Version that are displayed when you look at the properties for the EXE file are "TODO: XXXXX"

--- The only way to add a new item in one of the main sections of the program is to right click on a treeview node - which none of the users could figure out... you expect there to be some kind of button somewhere and a right click menu as a shortcut rather than the right click menu being the only way to do something.

--- It has a totally non standard window which took me a while to figure out how to close/minimize



So what other horrible programs have people had to use/install and what was horrible about them?

[JuggaloBrotha]

Chris, do you check the The Daily ***?

[baja_yu]

A small detail that catches my eye is the tab order. I've seen some good software out there that has a messed up tab order, jumping around all over the screen with no correct left-to-right, top-to-down order. Is it just me that pays attention to these kinds of details or what?!

[DeanMc]

The Daily what?

[baja_yu]

Three letters, I'm guessing 'donkey' synonym beginning with letter A.

[techgnome]

Is it just me that pays attention to these kinds of details or what?!

Nope... one of the first big things I did when I got to my current job year and a half ago was to standardize the toolbars and menus. Until then, it was all over the place.

-tg

[JuggaloBrotha]

Chris, do you check the The Daily ***?

The Daily what?

Sorry, it's the Daily w-t-f, vbf's filter took out the w-t-f for whatever reason

Edit: it even filtered out the url so you can't even click on it to go to the site, this is the 2nd time in a week that vbf's filter is blocking a legit site... vbf really needs to upgrade that filter..

[techgnome]

it's the language filter... and it's because we all know that the f stands for farts. Just like in w-t-h... the h stands for hockey.

-tg

[si_the_geek]

Edit: it even filtered out the url so you can't even click on it to go to the site, this is the 2nd time in a week that vbf's filter is blocking a legit site... vbf really needs to upgrade that filter..

It has filtered out swearing (albeit abbreviated) and spammers... while you have found a couple of cases annoying, I see no problem with the filter.

[chris128]

Chris, do you check the The Daily ***?

no I've never heard of it but just had a look and it looks pretty funny

[DeanMc]

....As for the SQL Server database, it had nearly 200 tables (mostly imported from Microsoft Access) and not a single stored procedure. Boolean-type values were represented as a CHAR(5) field, holding possible values of 'true', 'false', or NULL. Let me repeat that, because it bears repeating. Boolean-type values in the database were rendered as a CHAR(5) field holding possible values of 'true', 'false', or NULL.

Brilliant!

[chris128]

haha that is pretty good

I just remembered asking the 'lead programmer' at my last job (this was just as I started learning .NET) if there was anything you could do about people being able to read any .NET code you wrote if they used something like Reflector and his answer was: "Just mark your objects as Private and then no one can see them" ... bless. Then again this was coming from the guy that hard coded connection strings (along with domain admin credentials) into his software...

[FunkyDexter]

I quite requently come across booleans implemented as a char(1) containing a Y or N but a Char(5)... now that's special. Dates held as strings is another good 'un.

I think about the worst thing I've heard is from one of my team. At the place he used to work they'd frequently hold a bunch of foreign key values in a comma separated list in a single field. When he asked why they would adopt this monstrous practice he was told "because then it's easier to use in an IN clause".

[dilettante]

As clunky as some of these data representations sound, their ineffiency pales in comparison to XML. You have to parse:

<someitem type="boolean" value="true" />

<someitem type='boolean' value='true' />

<someitem type="boolean" value='true' />

<
someitem
type
=
"boolean"
value
=
"true"
>
</
someitem
>

<someitem type="boolean" value="& #116;rue" />

... among other possible combinations of punctuation and whitespace.