Field notes / Note 006
A day early is annoying
2 min
An app that tells a small company owner what is due, and when. Some of the rules behind those dates are ambiguous: a threshold that may have moved, a deadline that depends on how a month is counted.
The spec settles it. When a rule is ambiguous, show the earlier date. A reminder a day early is annoying. A reminder a day late is a penalty.
The same caution runs through the rest. Each rule ships with its source. Only the owner marks a rule verified, and a release build refuses to exist while any rule is not. The tests caught their own author too: in the first milestone, 2 of about 80 hand-computed dates in the tests were wrong.
The app is not on the store. Not every rule is verified. Until they are, it does not ship.