Let’s say that the enterprise software not only handles products, but also parts. Several parts combined, with some manufacturing effort, result in a product. Each part has a purchase price, the resulting product has a retail price. The retail price of the product should be higher than the sum of purchase prices of the parts. If it isn’t, you lose the costs of the manufacturing effort and some extra money with every successful sale.
If for any reason you cannot clearly estimate your manufacturing effort, the enterprise software has another input field for an amount of money that you can add to the sum of the parts’ costs. We call this field the “sales bonus”. So, if you sell a product made up of parts, your customer has to pay a price that consists at least of the retail prices of the parts and the sales bonus. Of course, your customer has an individual discount percentage that needs to be subtracted from the total price. Are you still following?
You are now thinking in the domain of price determination and financial mathematics. If you were the user of said enterprise software, you’d probably expect some bugs like these:
- It is possible to enter a retail price lower than the purchase price
- The price of products manufactured from parts isn’t calculated correctly
- It is possible to enter a negative sales bonus
- The total price with discount could be lower than the sum of purchase prices of the parts without a warning
All of them are bugs in the domain. All of them can be explained to a domain expert or a user with terms and concepts from the domain.
But what about the bug when you sell a product that consists of three parts, each with a retail price of 10 €, and a sales bonus of 5 €. You want to create a quote for your customer and the price shows up as 34,99999999998 €. You are a bit bewildered and try to countervail the apparent rounding error by changing the sales bonus to 5,00000000002 €. After this change you get another crazy total price and your prices in the database are different from what you entered, too. Everything seems to destabilize and deviate further and further from clear cut prices.
As a programmer, you know what happened. You know what caused this effect of numerical instability. Somebody stored monetary values in a floating point number. You know that is a bad idea and you’d never do this. But this blog post isn’t about you or what you should do or not do. It is about the user, expert in his domain, that stumbles over the bug as described and has to make some decision on how to fix it. This user cannot use any knowledge from the domain to even understand the mechanics of the bug. You, as the programmer, cannot explain this bug in terms of things the user already knows. You need to be vague (“the software doesn’t store the exact values, just approximations”) or introduce additional complexity (“we store this value by splitting it into a significand and multiply it with a factor consisting of a fixed base and an exponent. We can omit the base and just store the significand and the exponent and express a very large numerical range in just a few bits. Think about how cool that is!”).
Read the last explanation again, from the viewpoint of a salesman. We want to add some prices in the range of a few €, slap a moderate discount on top and call it a day. We don’t care about bits or exponential formulas. That is not part of our domain and it shouldn’t affect our domain or software that works in our domain. Confronting us with technical details reflects negatively on your ability to solve our problems. You seem to burden us with your problems in exchange.
As domain experts, we want only domain-aligned bugs.
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