What follows is a summary of the kind of exchange I have on a daily basis as a software engineer. I’ve obfuscated some details for obvious reasons.
Client: Here’s a document that contains a list of events we’d like you to integrate into the app. We need every event that the document contains.
For illustration purposes, let’s say it’s a document with a list of numbers from 1 to 10.
Me: Thanks. I’ll add those right away.
Some time later…
Me: Hi. I’ve added those events: 1-10 are all in there and verified as working.
Client: Events 11 and 12 are not coming through. Here is the document again. Please ensure that all of the events in the document are added.
Me: The document doesn’t contain events 11 and 12. It’s just 1-10. If you tell me what events 11 and 12 are though, I’ll be happy to add them for you.
A week or so passes…
Client: We checked and we don’t need event 11. Here are the details for event 12.
Client proceeds to supply about half of the required details.
Me: Hi. I’m afraid I’m also going to need to know X, Y and Z in order to be able to implement that event. Really the information needs to be in the same format as all the others that were supplied in the document.
A couple of days pass.
Client: Here is the information.
I add the missing event.
Me: Hi. That missing event has now been added.
Client: We’ve noticed that event 8 is showing XX when we expect it to show YY. Here is the document again.
Me: Hmm but the document specifically states XX as the expected payload for event 8.
Client: That’s an old version of the document. We’ll need to look into why you were supplied with that one because it’s a year out of date.
Me: Ok… so… shall I go ahead and replace event 8’s payload with YY?
Client: Yes please.
Me: Done!
About a week later.
Client: We’re seeing events 2 and 5 showing in our logs. We didn’t want those.
Me: Hi. Events 2 and 5 were added because they were included in the list of 1-10 in the document that was supplied. So… have they been removed from the latest version?
Client: No, they are still there. But we don’t need them.
Me: Ok, I can remove them. Do you want any others removed at the same time, or just those two?
About a week passes with no answer.
Client: We’re still seeing events 2 and 5 in our logs. We thought they might have been removed by now.
Me: I was waiting for you to confirm which events you wanted removed. Was it just 2 and 5 or were there any others?
A day or two pass.
Client: We’ll also need event 6 removed too.
Me: Ok so that’s 2, 5 and 6 to come out, correct?
Client: No, just 5 and 6.
Me: So 2 no longer needs to come out?
Client: No. We need that one.
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