Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
Let me tell you a story about proprietary software:
The German police force have a contracz with a software firm that wrote their program to file and archive emergency calls. Basically just a form that goes to a database. Now, one day, an update got pushed. The problem with that update was that the hotkey for quitting out of the current form (q) now also fired when inside an editing field. The software firm did not acknowledge that as a problem and it took months of complaints to fix and it cost the taxpayer around 300,000€ Euros in “maintenance fees”.
agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 10 months ago
As someone who works with government agencies as a software developer: they are absolutely awful.
You’ll get no specification at all, those you do get will change at least three times and every stupid little decision needs at least 20 people from different states, cities or agencies to agree.
Yes, the bug is pretty bad, but I’m also very sure that what you’re describing is not the whole story.
rikudou@lemmings.world 10 months ago
That bug should have been a hotfix. Or a rollback.
agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 10 months ago
You never worked with bureaucracy, did you?
From a technical standpoint, you are absolutely correct, but reality and bureaucracy don’t always match.
I’ve had instances, where we had glaring holes in our security, but were not allowed to fix them, because the datacenter (operated by a public agency) only does deployment in a fixed schedule.
I’ve had officials of some sort who wrote in the contract, that each and every change has to be on the staging environment for at least one week for testing and signoff.
It’s absurd and stupid, but realistically, you often can’t change it.
rikudou@lemmings.world 10 months ago
I did, that’s why I’m talking about it.
In my experience, what you say is absolutely true, but glaring bugs like that are deployed as a hotfix.
barsoap@lemm.ee 10 months ago
That’s one of the reasons why dataport (who are going to do the migration as the state’s IT consultant / dev house) was founded in the first place: So that IT can work like IT does and not be beholden to bosses who think in bridge construction terms in one place, and tax collection terms in another. Now those bosses are mere clients of an inter-state agency that does nothing but IT, and IT can talk with its own authority when it comes to IT matters.