Questioning technical self-help

The first two letters featured in this month's " Forum " are in response to Pamela Samuelson's " Legally Speaking " column, " Embedding Technical Self-Help in Licensed Software, " Communications, Oct. 1997, p. 13. A few years ago, while working as a lowly clerk for a major university, I created a large spread-sheet-based application. At the time I left, the state of the pro-duct's development (and mine) was such that internal tables and other odds and ends had to be updated in preparation for each new academic year. Spreadsheet macro code and complicated for-mulae are neither the most maintainable nor commentable forms of source; I was the only person who could have been expected to update the product at a reasonable cost—or possibly at all. Knowing the product would need attention a year hence to avoid bad data entry requiring thousands of corrections, I both advised in writing that future development would not be free and implemented something technically similar to self-help: After a given date, warning messages popped up, and after a later date, the application disabled. I also communicated to the department some months in advance that attention would be required. Okay, they said, they would do it. Bottom line: When it disabled (and not before), guess who updated it? This was a benign disable-ment. No data was lost and the purpose was to prevent entry of incorrect data. My point is: look what got attention from the licensee. Moreover, when I completed the required work (which now allowed self-configuration to avoid a repeat, something I hadn't been able to implement earlier) and invoiced modestly, it took nine months to get paid, and that happened only after repeated efforts to collect. I might add that the relationship had always been cooperative to that point; the difficulty lay mostly in the fact that the path of action was unfamiliar to those involved three management levels above the users. From this experience, I have no doubt that a second disable-ment, for the purpose this time of enforcing payment, would definitely have gotten attention when nothing else would—and would have made folks mad as you'd care to imagine. Any possibility of future work or referral would have been lost, a serious business consequence if that had been my main line of work. No small developer can afford to include self-help in a product without due consideration as to the decision …