During the course of a career lasting over 20 years, would you care to guess how many times I have been given data from a software developer that later turned out not to be correct?

A maximum of three.

Once, another developer informed me that something I had written wasn’t true. I provided the developer with a copy of the e-mail in which a different developer had said it was true. (No, I didn’t rat out the original developer by providing their name.) The developer demonstrated to me that it could not possibly be true. So I changed the docs.

A second time, it was a similar scenario, except that I was obliged to accept the latter developer’s word that it wasn’t true. And I changed the docs.

I’m not sure there was a third time, but it’s possible that one happened and I forgot about it. Which is why I used the word “maximum.”

Even though three is a small number, it seems smaller to me when I consider how many thousands of facts I have had provided to me by developers over the years.

If I’m honest, I guess that three also seems small to me because I am comparing it to the number of corrections I have been obliged to make over the years. Getting it right the first time happens, but very rarely.