Chapter 34. How We Figured Out What Sucked

So, if you've just read the previous chapter, you may well be asking, "Okay, but how do you figure out what sucks?"

Well, some of it's really obvious. You press a button and the program takes 10 minutes to respond. That sucks pretty bad. You get 100 complaints a week about the UI of a particular page – okay, so that sucks.

Usually there are one or two HUGE things that really suck, and they're really obvious – those are the things to focus on first, even if they require a tremendous amount of work. For example, before Bugzilla 3.0, Bugzilla had to compile every single library and the entire script it was about to run, every time you loaded a page. This added several seconds to each page load, on slower machines, and at least 1 second on faster machines. So performance was one big obvious thing that sucked about Bugzilla. But even more importantly, the code of Bugzilla sucked. It was being read by everybody...