Thursday, July 8, 2010

How to hide problems in software behind business rules (and what happens afterwards). Case Study part 2

Few weeks have passed and after some very difficult red tape I succeeded getting the necessary information. It only took me around 6 emails and 3 phone calls to get answer to a question "How are after 23 o'clock made payments handled and why it takes so long to reach to third party system".
What I found out was little disturbing - Payments made after 23 o'clock are handled by persons during the next work day manually and then sent to Tax and Customs Board day after that. This of course explains why payment reaches to next systems over 24 hours later. The day-to-day human interaction are put in place to handle corner case problems. Also I found out that Tax and Customs Board is trying modify their own system to accept these corner cases by in their end. I personally don't have much faith in it. I see various problems like how to separate faulty data with enough certainty or if owner of the first part system (banks) aren't willing enough to give out all necessary information about their system behaviour to very high detail.

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