Stakeholders including customers, other developers, testers and managers hate finding spelling mistakes. Many people see it as a simple mistake that could have been avoided. In this article we will explore the role of the developer and what they can do to limit the addition of spelling errors in software development.
I’m not going to pretend that I have had problem free life with spelling, in fact often at interviews when asked “what is your weakness?” (Crazy question in the first place). I will uncomfortably shift in my chair disclose spelling. I have tried to hide it, but you simply cannot outrun it. Let’s get one thing clear however, It does not reflect your ability to develop, maintain code or refine user stories, so don’t be hard on yourself. After all programming is born out of mathematics not English.
Typos can be defined as a small typo that mixes American English and British English or a massive mistype that changes the context of the sentence to make it rude, offensive, impolite or legally liable. What a kill joy for developing fun software, so let’s look at what we can do to gift our future selfs.
You should be open with your employer, it is up to you when you do this but certainly do it as soon as you can. You will be surprised at how sympathetic they will be, most employers want quality software and assigning the right strengths to the right role is all part of that. If it’s brought up continually in your review with phrases such as attention to detail, that’s your trigger point to have a grown-up conversation.
If you have the same struggle as I do, you are going to want to read this article for some of my get out of jail fundamentals. I will go into these in greater detail later, but first what does bad spelling mean for you and your company. The company will claim that they have more to lose than the individual. In my opinion however these risks apply to company and the individual.
- Impression of a Lack Attention to detail.
- Audience dialect mistakes.
- Undermines Confidence in Product
- Not all mistakes can be corrected (think email)
- Misspelling makes a rude word.
- Repetitional damage.
- Dilutes your message.
“The 2022 UK Apprentice with Lord Sugar shows the consequence for a small but significant misspelling albeit hyped up for the show. The panel of software industry specialists including one of the makers of Tomb Raider where instantly turned off when they saw the game that was presented in front of them. Why? You guessed it, the title was spelt wrong, and the industry specialists sighted attention to detail as the main reason they sold no units.”
Dont fall into the trap of promising you will find and fix all typos at a later date. You are highly likely upset the wrong person prematurely and why not continuously improve your system as you work.
I remember working on a mobile app that made home reports for selling houses. I knew there where typos and I chose to ignore them over writing new functionality. My boss at the time ended up getting mad and sent me an email stating his position. I sorted the mistakes that evening and the next day he was far more relaxed. The moral is that spelling really bothers people, so sort mistakes as soon as you see them and search the whole program as often mistakes are repeated.
IDE Spellchecking is now common and comes as standard with JetBrains products and with visual studio and eclipse, you can download a plugin that will enhance your IDE. These little tools work in a similar fashion to word. Typos and grammar improvements are underlined in either red or green retrospectively and you can event add your own custom words to your dictionary. The spellcheckers can also decipher camel/pascal case which is cool and let’s be honest that is how most code is written
Peer reviewing is a brilliant way to get eyes on your work before anyone major sees it. There is usually a great speller in every group. Find that person and get to know how they like their tea made and make sure they know you appreciate their help in this area. Avoid people who are critical and only those who genuinely want to help.
Cut and paste as a developer can be dangerous, but it’s the safest way to transfer text you have been given by the author. This can come from many different people such as UX, managers, subject specialists and even outside sources. Always cut and paste this text, treat it as a printing works does, they don’t see as their job ensure the text is correct. I would however just give it a curtesy check and read through it to ensure it reads correctly. Using this method, you will soon find out who is as bad at spelling as you are and you can both work together to close the gap and make quality software.
Concentrate on one word at a time. This is a nice and easy way of paying yourself forward and learning to spell better gradually. I don’t know at what point I learnt to do this, but you will notice that each project you work on will provide a common word and with that you will notice that you will consistently spell that word wrong. Over the years for me this has been field (feild), calendar (calender) and various other words. I have singled out these words and concentrated on getting them correct. In doing this you get a small confidence boost and confine them to the words you no longer spell wrong.
Read it again, write it again, read it again. Seems obvious right? You would be surprised at what slips out of your mind before you hand it over under the pressure of targets. I have read this article many times and I am constantly changing in the hope it reads better.
IDE Refactor takes the hassle out of the misspelling of file names, classes, variables and comments, which makes it more powerful than a find and replace. For example: Say you want to change a class name only, you will have peace of mind that it has been changed everywhere in the program. It ensures that everything is renamed programmatically. Have a look for this feature by right/command clicking on your misspelled word and look for refactor.
Find and replace should only be used as find and never replace. Once you have searched your program for spelling mistakes use IDE refactor above to rename this value programatically. However it is a great way, once something has been highlighted to you, for you to check your code for similar misspellings.
Business text in software is a big no, no. Try and keep code and customers text separate. This includes menus, lists, field names and large bodies of text. Instead, should be processed as reference and configuration files. The benefit of this is you can change customer facing language without having to rebuild your software. In addition you can change customer facing language from English to German and earn yourself a nice premium that non English language apps can command.
Thats it, from time to time spelling may still continue to raise its ugly head but if you can reduce the occurrences of it, then when it does happen it will have less impact. Also don’t hide, you are only human after all and never let it shame you away from new opportunities. If people know they will help you as everyone has an interest in making a successful product.