    
Sharon M. Foster
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Smfoster
Post Number: 108
Registered: 02-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 | | Posted on Saturday, October 27, 2007 - 5:27 am: | |
Well said, Marian! The interfaces between systems, and the fact that more than one subsystem may be involved in any e-voting scheme, is not a topic that has been discussed much in this forum recently. The fact that changing one variable, or one field, can impact another subsystem is not a mystery to people who develop mission- or safety-critical software. For one thing, in those environments you can't change a single line of code without jumping through a whole lot of hoops. For another thing, the interfaces between subsystems are very well-defined. Several layers of review and then testing catch most (but not all!) errors of this kind. Unfortunately sometimes the customer ends up being the beta tester, which is what happened here.
But that's only the error that got caught. What about the errors that didn't get caught, even in beta test? |
