People’s freedom jeopardised by new software adopted by California’s courts

> The software, created by Texas-based Tyler Technologies, costs about $5m (£4m) and is set to gradually replace a decades-old e-filing system that looks like something a hacker would use in a Hollywood movie.

> Tyler Technologies acknowledged in a statement that the upgrade process had been “challenging” - but said poor training was to blame for bad inputting of data and integration with third-party applications that often introduce glitches into the system.

Even as someone who spends the majority of the day at the command prompt, I agree we should always be attentive to user-interface issues. But I've been less than optimistic that people will have the wisdom to know that a new "modern" interface automatically means it's more sophisticated/elegant, or that it's more attuned to the needs of human users.

In particular, it's been alarming to see a rise in unnecessary use of AJAX (nevermind Angular) in government applications. I'm not anti-JS, it's just that client-end development seems to have far more moving parts of the kind that don't get well-tested by workers in a bureaucracy. Especially when that work has been farmed out.

edit: as an example of how government can do modern web-dev/UX well, I can think of no better (at least at the U.S. federal level) example than the CFPB: https://cfpb.github.io/

I think that's a bit harsh without knowing whether the software vendor was allowed to be effectively involved in the training and integration efforts. Software like this depends on lots of processes around the rollout and usage being properly designed and executed, and the fact that the software is being used successfully in many places suggests that the vendor knows how to deploy the software safely. Whether they were complicit in not doing so in the case of Alameda County is the important question. Maybe the county ran out of money at the last minute and the vendor couldn't stop them from cutting corners on the rollout. Maybe the vendor doesn't think it's good customer relations to go public with the fact that they told the county over and over again that they were creating risks of errors like this. Maybe they even had stipulations in their contract to stop improper integrations from happening and the government ignored them or found a way around them.

Hopefully there will be an investigation and the people will find out who screwed up and why so they can be held accountable. It's tempting to say that everyone involved is "responsible" in some vague way, but that lets people off too easy. If everyone is guilty, then no one is guilty.

We need formal codes of practice, we need good institutions, but we also need a cultural change.

We no longer have the luxury of saying "oh, it's just a CRUD app, it doesn't matter if things go wrong". Software has become too important, it has become too deeply intertwined in our daily lives. Errors and leaks from trivial little apps can have life-changing consequences for users.

If your software handles personally identifying data, there's a non-zero chance that you could ruin someone's life through negligence. Legal case management software might be an obvious example, but it's the tip of a very big iceberg.

If you have several million users, one-in-a-million edge cases are going to happen constantly. Weird things happen at scale. We need to treat every Android permission and every Facebook API call as a potential matter of life or death. We need the personal courage and the support of our peers to say "no, I will not implement that feature", "no, I will not store that user data", "no, I will not transmit that in plaintext", "no, I will not commit that to production without unit testing".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring

The point here is perhaps that some errors are less forgivable than others.

May be in the field like this some extra care should be taken to ensure that, despite possible clerical errors, the data entered is sufficiently accurate. Technically that's likely extra checks and more thoughts about clearness of UI. "Just clerical error" doesn't sound like enough justification in cases like this - software should actively help to avoid those errors, and do enough of that help.

Working as intended. Will not fix. Errors lead to keeping the for-profit prison cells more fully occupied. Even if merely temporary occupants. It doesn't matter as long as cell vacancy remains low. Revenue depends on having prison cells occupied. This leads to higher profits, executive bonuses and shareholder value.