Things Developers say - But it works for this case

I love my developers, some of the smartest people I've worked with, but every once in a while they say something odd about why a problem isn't a problem.

(I really need to start writing these down when they happen for better posts.)

There's a feature on Skystore, where if you rent a movie but don't play it for 28 days, we'll send you an e-mail reminding you there's only two days left to watch. The subject of the e-mail is something like: "Only 2 days left to watch [movie name]".

As you can imagine waiting 30 days to test something like this is not feasible, especially for an automation enthusiast such as myself.

Luckily we have ways to trigger this e-mails before the time runs out, which leads to an e-mail with the following subject: "Only 0.0416666666666667 days left to watch".

I didn't bother to see the code on how two days turn into less than half a day if you force the service to run, but got some reassuring that this only happened if you force to service to run earlier. It's fine, we log a bug on the issue tracker the same, just not a "fix it now" kind of bug.

A couple days go by, a dev comes back to me:

- You know, that has to do with the time left calculation, if we wait 28 days the e-mail will look well.

- So you're telling me it's fine because for the current business requirement that calculation happens to give a whole number?

- Yes.

- This value is configurable, so if someone decides it's supposed to be 3 days instead of 2, we change the config value and our customers start receiving mails telling them they have 2.333333333 days to watch?

*blank stare* - Ok we'll take care of it next sprint.

Yes I did say "3" that many times out loud.