Error Codes

I bought a new lens for my digital SLR a couple weeks ago. As I was checking out at the store, I noticed that the staff was setting up for an instructional session of some sort. I asked them which session it was, and the clerk said it was their digital photography basics class. He said the class came about because the staff was having to answer all sorts of these basic questions and do all these quick fixes (white balance settings, etc.) for everybody. So they started giving classes so consolidate their answers into one place, so their staff wouldn't have to spend so much time answering these little one-off questions.

"Sounds similar to my job," I replied, and I explained what I do. He then said something along the lines of "Look, if you guys do one thing for your users, do this: give them human-readable error messages. I hate when I'm fiddling with something and I get error -463259 or whatever. Just tell me that the lens cap is on or the filter size is too small or something!"

I laughed because I know all to well what frustration he's talking about. After all, I use software (and other error-generating products) too :-) Luckily we pay a good bit of attention to error codes in LabVIEW. Most of the descriptions are edited by a technical writer in the same way we would edit any other piece of documentation. And for our non-native English speaking users of LabVIEW toolkits and modules, we translate the error codes into several languages, even if we don't translate the product itself. If you're frustrated with our software, there's nothing worse than trying to read error codes that are written in a language other than your native one. (Well, that's not totally true; I could think of a couple things worse than that!)

Yes, we have wonky numeric error codes, and sure there are spots where we are probably uninformative. But overall I think we do a good job of communicating why the error occurred and how you could go about solving it. Of course sometimes we can't give this information because we simply don't know it. There could be numerous causes for a particular error, and only one of them would be relevant to what you're trying to do.

What do you think about LabVIEW's error code documentation? Is it helpful to you? How could we improve it?