6.12 Hardware Errors

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Hardware issues are among the most frustrating a user can encounter. An example would be having a user choose to print a report and watch it scroll by on the screen, at a million words per second. The printer device was not specified correctly or not specified at all. The user assumed a printer would print the report, but device errors or lack of device handling caused this situation. There are many types of devices that a programmer must account for, and the testing process needs to account for user interaction on all of them. Aside from the condition cited, programs can send the wrong codes to the right device, overrun the device with data, and so on. Programmers and testers are responsible for ensuring that these conditions are accounted for and tested before the user community is exposed to them. All these types of errors can do is give you a bad mark in credibility as your users rate your performance.

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