A lightweight and flexible process for designing intuitive error handling and effective error messages
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Unintuitive error handling and ineffective messages result in lost revenue, wasted time, and unsatisfied customers. Yet, error conditions are often considered edge cases. As a result, a focus on error conditions is usually left until late in the software design and development cycle and is sometimes limited to just resolving unexpected test case failures. This paper outlines a process that enables software development teams to collaborate more effectively to produce intuitive error handling and useful error messages. The process is structured: there are artifacts to produce and rituals to step through. However, the process is also lightweight and flexible. In addition, the process scales well for small and large projects. This paper also describes the benefits that the IBM® DB2® for Linux®, UNIX®, and Windows® (henceforth referred to as IBM DB2 LUW) software development team discovered after adopting this process, including better quality messages, a shorter and easier-to-manage translation cycle, and improved integration between error messages and related product documentation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.071 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".