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

We already have a taste of these rules and regulations, for example HIPAA, PCI, and FIPS-140. I'm not saying I disagree with you, but keep in mind that those are all considered quite burdensome, and it's hard to see how that could be different. Also FIPS-140 is a good example of a standard that names specific technologies and so is doomed to lag behind the state of the art. Just be careful what you wish for! But as you say, it seems inevitable for more rules to be imposed eventually, one way or another, so perhaps we should think about how we might write better ones.

> “With the old system, it took maybe one or two clicks to complete a process,” she said. “Now it takes 25 clicks, and there are drop-down boxes and all of that.”

> Because the system is so unwieldy, clerks are unable to enter data in the courtroom, she said, so that burden has fallen on other office workers. It’s created a backlog of more than 12,000 files that have not been uploaded — and that number is growing by up to 300 files a day, according to Woods.

Sounds like it's mostly a software design problem to me, rather than "clerk/user stupidity" issue:

http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Alameda-County-s-...

I would amend that to "don't put the blame solely on the developers". I've seen way too many developers whose mentality is "ship it, it seems good enough, we'll fix any bugs as we go".

I worked as a programmer for a smaller California county court system for about five years, and have seen something very much like this play out before (both in my county and others).

I can't comment on the Tyler product or their training directly; maybe they really are a rock star outfit. But if this is like past attempts, this project has all of of the worst of aspects of software development risks and none of our more "modern" methods to mitigate them.

The court employees - most of whom would _not_ be considered very computer savvy - probably had a lot of training directly with Tyler but are struggling with a system that a) doesn't meet their needs, b) changes years (decades?) of ingrained workflow habits and terminology, and c) may be much slower than what they used to have.

Observations from past projects like this:

* at it's heart it's a database CRUD app, but with hundreds of tables and thousands of fields and business "logic" encoded (in more database fields) to help with validation and workflow

* most of the above fields need to be fully customized for each county, so add in tables and logic to modify your UI on every screen

* this software was not built for Alameda county, but re-purposed from use elsewhere. Terms and concepts for how the law worked in the state this was originally built for may or may not apply here.

* "usability" success metric: "do all 50 fields on the page accept input and save data in less than 60 seconds?" (i.e. no concept of real HCI usability design at all)

* iteration process: waterfall. Vendor sits with court subject experts for 2-3 months, documenting all of the workflow. They customize their product to meet those needs, and a month later show a build that does this. Court can't use it yet (deployment locally would cost way too much), but they've printed out hundred of pages of screen shots to help document how it could be used. Hire external consultants to help with this process. Repeat until a) court money runs out or b) someone's reputation will be tarnished if the system doesn't launch

* There is no staging environment. Deployment is on local hardware only (no cloud). No bug tracker exists that the court can see. Builds are not automated, and "maintenance" may cost the court additional money.

* importing previous cases: worst ETL job you can imagine. Take data from an aging mainframe database that may or may not have any relational integrity at all, and try to plug it into a system as described in point 1

* administrative overhead: your county is given money from the state to do this, and then no choice about which vendor or software to use (because the state wants to roll this out in _all_ counties... each of which is very different from one another, even in CA)

tl;dr This is a horribly difficult software update, subject to the worst practices in our industry.

Personally, I don't think blaming court employees for "clerical errors" is fair at all - not that those haven't happened, but (from my experience) these are hard working people who care about justice yet have really lousy software that impedes their job.

I'd love to see a company do this software right - custom build, real iterative development hand in hand with the users. The Courts really needs it, they've never experienced a high quality product in this area, and the inefficiencies affect the wider economy (because civil matters are faster to resolve).

[edit: formatting]

However, the fault probably does not lie in someone writing bad software; it's more about the authorities themselves defining a bad workflow when specifying the system.

I say this based on just a bit of personal experience in working with authorities and their mode of operation (in Europe but I expect US is not that different): it's often about covering one's ass by insisting on lots of checks and balances, and the work amounts generated by the processes are often neglected because they are someone else's problem.

This looks like fundamentally a public sector process issue. They'll improve it though.