Bring the Awkward Case to the Software Demo

Test a software demo with missing information, corrections and interruptions. See the checking work your team would inherit before choosing a tool.

Ask the software provider to show what happens when the information is incomplete.

A smooth demonstration can show what a product is capable of. A difficult case helps you understand what your team would have to do around it.

The checking work matters for ordinary software and for tools that use AI. The question is whether the proposed way of working can handle the cases your business needs it to handle.

Bring an awkward case to the software demo

Choose an exception from the work itself. It might be a duplicate customer record, a cancelled job or an update that arrives after an invoice has been prepared. Use synthetic or properly cleared information in the demonstration.

Ask to follow that case through. What does the system detect? Who sees the problem? Can a colleague correct it without losing the original information? What still has to happen outside the tool?

For an AI feature, include an input that does not contain enough information for a reliable answer. Ask the supplier to show the review step and what prevents an unreviewed result from being sent or used.

Stack Overflow's 2025 developer survey identifies answers that are nearly correct and time spent correcting generated code among respondents' frustrations. That is a self-selected developer survey, not a measurement of every business tool. Their experience gives a useful reason to examine the checking work around a promising output.

Watch the correction, not just the result

An error message is part of the demonstration. So is the work needed to recover.

Ask what happens after an interruption or a retry. Can the same action happen twice? Where would a colleague see what already completed? If a person must approve a result, can the supplier demonstrate that the system actually stops for that decision?

A built-in control, a manual review or a configuration change might address the issue. Each can be reasonable for the right workload. Establish who would do the work and whether the quoted service includes setting it up.

Decide what a small trial needs to prove

Agree on a limited trial using the situations that matter to your team. Include an ordinary successful case as well as the difficult one, and define what would make the trial worth continuing.

A missing feature might be tolerable if the remaining manual work is small and visible. A tool that hides incomplete work may create a more serious problem even when its successful outputs look impressive.

Sometimes the existing tool, configured better, is sufficient. Sometimes a new product is the clearer choice. Custom development may be justified where an important requirement cannot be met sensibly another way, provided the business can support its ongoing care.

A business that has not yet agreed which work the tool is supposed to improve needs to settle that before judging the demo. The Altvina Blueprint is one route to a clearer diagnosis and a reasoned choice of what to do next.

More from this week

This piece stands on its own. Here are this week's 5 pieces:

• Monday: Who Can Recover Your Business Accounts?
• Tuesday: Try the Work Before You Change Your Career
• Wednesday: Bring the Awkward Case to the Software Demo (this post)
• Thursday: You Can Build a Career Without Managing People (coming Thursday)
• Friday: Ask What Would Change the Recommendation (coming Friday)

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