29 November 2009, 13:14

Once again, and we are not learning!

La Repubblica of last Thursday [1] and other Italian newspapers have reported on a “computer” error that temporarily brought thousands of accounts at the national postal service bank into the red. It is a software error, due to a misplacement of the decimal points in some transactions.

As usual the technical details are hazy; La Repubblica writes that:

“Because of a software change that did not succeed, the computer system did not always read the decimal point during transactions”.

As a result, it could for example happen that a 15.00-euro withdrawal was understood as 1500 euros.

I have no idea what “reading the decimal point ” means. (There is no mention of OCR, and the affected transactions seem purely electronic.) Only some of the 12 million checking or “Postamat” accounts were affected; the article cites a number of customers who could not withdraw money from ATMs because the system wrongly treated their accounts as over-drawn. It says that this was the only damage and that the postal service will send a letter of apology. The account leaves many questions unanswered, for example whether the error could actually have favored some customers, by allowing them to withdraw money they did not have, and if so what will happen.

The most important unanswered question is the usual one: what was the software error? As usual, we will probably never know. The news items will soon be forgotten, the postal service will somehow fix its code, life will go on. Nothing will be learned; the next time around similar causes will produce similar effects.

I criticized this lackadaisical attitude in an earlier column [2] and have to hammer its conclusion again: any organization using public money should be required, when it encounters a significant software malfunction, to let experts investigate the incident in depth and report the results publicly. As long as we keep forgetting our errors we will keep repeating them. Where would airline safety be in the absence of thorough post-accident reports? That a software error did not kill anyone is not a reason to ignore it. Whether it is the Italian post messing up, a US agency’s space vehicle crashing on the moon or any other software fault causing systems to fail, it is not enough to fix the symptoms: we must have a professional report and draw the lessons for the future.

Reference

[1] Luisa Grion: Poste in tilt per una virgola — conti gonfiati, stop ai prelievi. In La Repubblica, 26 November 2009, page 18 of the print version. (At the time of writing it does not appear at repubblica.it, but see the TV segment also titled “Poste in tilt per una virgola” on Primocanale Web TV here, and other press articles e.g. in Il Tempo here.)

[2] On this blog: The one sure way to advance software engineering (post of 21 August 2009).

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