Your analogy is a bit flawed. Most people wouldn't say to a heart surgeon "how hard can it be to unclog an artery". However, another heart surgeon would. Since I write and fix code, I think I'm entitled.
"but that nobody would tell the developers the correct date calculation to use"
That is an assumption on your part. I would ASSUME that something this basic would have been defined as part of the system requirements. I would ASSUME something this basic would be testing in user acceptance testing. But, even if it wasn't - then how did the auditors know the dates were wrong? Must have been either documented or common knowledge.
As for fixing it - I do a fair amount of investigating and resolving issues where a line on a report or a value on a screen is incorrect - all on systems that I came in on cold and the original developers have moved on. This happens at a lot of places all the time. It is often hard and confusing tracing peoples code, but in the vast majority of the cases it really does come down to correcting the calculateReleaseDate function in prison_system.c. The harder part is usually correcting all of bad data.
This is the sort of article I always find disturbing... We found a minor problem but take our word for it - its no big deal. Why wouldn't this article explicitly what the flaw was that allowed this to occur - this isn't any sort of system security issue. And then to compound it by say "but it wasn't any murderers" - why - sheer luck?
"They say they've already taken steps to correct the computer glitch and will continue to work until the problem is taken care of." Okay - maybe some of you slashdotters are smarter on this than me, but how long can it take to correct a date calculation routine? Unless maybe you don't have one of the dates you need????
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Your analogy is a bit flawed. Most people wouldn't say to a heart surgeon "how hard can it be to unclog an artery". However, another heart surgeon would. Since I write and fix code, I think I'm entitled. "but that nobody would tell the developers the correct date calculation to use" That is an assumption on your part. I would ASSUME that something this basic would have been defined as part of the system requirements. I would ASSUME something this basic would be testing in user acceptance testing. But, even if it wasn't - then how did the auditors know the dates were wrong? Must have been either documented or common knowledge. As for fixing it - I do a fair amount of investigating and resolving issues where a line on a report or a value on a screen is incorrect - all on systems that I came in on cold and the original developers have moved on. This happens at a lot of places all the time. It is often hard and confusing tracing peoples code, but in the vast majority of the cases it really does come down to correcting the calculateReleaseDate function in prison_system.c. The harder part is usually correcting all of bad data.
This is the sort of article I always find disturbing... We found a minor problem but take our word for it - its no big deal. Why wouldn't this article explicitly what the flaw was that allowed this to occur - this isn't any sort of system security issue. And then to compound it by say "but it wasn't any murderers" - why - sheer luck? "They say they've already taken steps to correct the computer glitch and will continue to work until the problem is taken care of." Okay - maybe some of you slashdotters are smarter on this than me, but how long can it take to correct a date calculation routine? Unless maybe you don't have one of the dates you need????