Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Christian" data-source="post: 4812239" data-attributes="member: 381">At a certain level of abstraction, yes. But I really doubt that the designers and the programmers are the same individuals, or even overlap. And if there weren't a clear rule for this in the PH, I don't think I'd be comfortable taking the decision of the programmers as official, even given that they work for WOTC.Maybe I'm just oversensitive to this. I've been struggling with this at my place of employment, where applications I designed are most employees' general interaction with certain company policies. I've found a regrettable tendency amongst the users to start treating the program as if it's the company president--as if the program determines the policy. The program implements the policy; if you don't agree with the policy, arguing with the program or the programmers is not a productive strategy. And it's perfectly possible that the policy it implements is a mistake or a bug--if there's a conflict between the written SOP and what the program allows, then it's the program that's wrong. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Anyway, the point is, the programmers could have implemented this as some kind of workaround in the absence of a printed rule. (If there weren't a printed rule.) And this can conceivably slip past QA and into production. It shouldn't happen, but it does, even at companies with very solid software development practices. And that makes me reluctant to treat the software as a definitive rules source. It's a great and useful tool, but nothing more.</blockquote>

Verification