Bad Design

Part 1.

This summer my dishwasher broke down. It was a Miele from the nineties, a very good dish washer I was happy with. A bit noisy but it washed my dish all right. But this summer the water pump broke. Instead of replacing the water pump I decided to buy a modern dishwasher, I decided to go for a Bosch machine, and I installed it some weeks ago. It does a good job, the dish is clean, but still I’m a bit disappointed, the new machine is a tiny bit less noisy but it takes longer time to do the dish, and I do not like that. And it doesn’t dry the dish as good as the old one, I do not like that either. But  what really bugs me is the cutlery basket of the Bosch dishwasher:

In front the old lighter Miele cutlery basket and behind the darker Bosch basket.

As you can see the handle of the Miele basket is strengthened  by two beams for better stability. The Bosch handle is reinforced by beams on the inside of the handle creating perfect pockets trapping condensing steam making sure you always get wet and water is dripping down on the cutlery when you grab the handle.

The Bosch handle with inside water trapping beams.

This is not only an example of bad design but also of inadequate testing. If the Q&A guys in the Bosch laboratory had bothered to test the cutlery basket they would have spotted the problem, and sent it back to the developers.

Part 2.

Last week I had a call from a colleague ‘can you help with an interface, we need to transfer purchase orders from our SAP ERP system to the ERP systems of vendors’.

The vendors didn’t want to use the web portal as such, but preferred to exchange orders and acknowledgements via files. The problem was our ERP system could only communicate via CSV files and the vendors systems expected messages in their XML formats. If you have XML files on both sides a small XSL script is all you need, but our ERP system’s vendor portal can only communicate via CSV files. The year is 2014! I would not have created such an interface.

"Interface Type:","POCONF",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, "Owner Partner:","XY00000025",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, "Partner:","X000000001",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, "Selection Profile Number:","00000000000001000045",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, "Selection Profile Name:","PD_CONFIRM_PO",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, "Created By:","XYZ123",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, "Created On:","17.11.2014 10:47:59 CET",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, "ORDER_ID","ITEM_ID","REQUESTED","CONFIRMED","TO_BE_CONF","REJECT","PRODUCT_ID","REV_LEVEL_ITEM","QUANTITY","QUANTITY_UNIT","DELIVERY_DATE","DELIVERY_TIME","DELIVERY_TZONE","SHIPPING_DATE","SHIPPING_TIME","SHIPPING_TZONE","REQ_PRICE","CONF_PRICE","CURRENCY","PRICE_BASE_QUANTITY","PRICE_BASE_QUANTITY_UNIT","SALES_ORDER_REFERENCE","REQ_MPN","CONF_MPN","REQ_MFR","CONF_MFR","CUST_LOC_ID","CMP_ID","CMP_PRODUCT_ID","CMP_REV_LEVEL","CMP_REQ_DATE","CMP_QUANTITY","CMP_QUANTITY_UNIT","CMP_BATCH_ID" "PO No.","PO Item No.","Requested","Confirmed","To Be Confirmed","To Be Rejected","Product","RevLvl","Quantity","UoM","Deliv. Date","Deliv.Time","DlvTZ","Ship. Date","Ship. Time","ShipTZ","Requested Price","Confirmed Price","Crcy","PrU.","PrUoM","Reference Document Number of Sales Order","Requested MPN","Confirmed MPN","Requested Mfr","Confirmed Mfr","Customer Loc.","Component ID","Product","RevLvl","Requirement Date","Qty","UoM","Cust. Batch" "4700000386","20","X","","","","ABC0221300","","2.200","PC","05.01.2015","00:00:00","CET","24.12.2014","23:59:55","CET","4,85","0.000000 ","SEK","1","PC","","","","","","6100","","","","","","","" "4700000386","20","","","X","","ABC0221300","","2.200","PC","05.01.2015","00:00:00","CET","","","CET","","","","","","","","","","","","","","","","","","" ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

A CSV file, SAP interface format.

As you see this is some CSV file! First we have a file header, then two! lines of labels and then purchase order lines. Anyone with experience of parsing CSV files understands this is not the easiest file to parse.

This is not only an example of bad design but also of inadequate testing. If the Q&A guys in the SAP laboratory had eaten their own dog food, they would had sent this back to the developers.