End-users
who have to resort to ‘kill’ or Task Manager after much
cursing will likely have a different take. A program that
becomes completely unresponsive or that crashes is probably
the most frustrating thing a user can experience,
particularly when there’s unsaved work at stake.
This
is the second time in the last year or so that I’ve heard
this interesting perspective: if you allow the symptom of a
bug/error-situation be as bad as it can be (a hang, a
crash), developers will be more likely to notice it and more
motivated to fix it. (The first was on a discussion of
parameter validation in C/C++ code). It seems to me that
position is reasonable when you’re talking about issues you
know for sure will reproduce at development time. But
there’s no way to ensure all possible failure scenarios are
seen during development, thus I personally don’t think it’s
acceptable to knowingly allow a crash or hang.
Anyway,
that’s my two cents.
John
My personal preference is to have a
frozen UI since it forces developers to fix it fast.
