16 ms·

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

260 points by dct 10y ago

the-dude 10y ago
tl; dr; No need to be concerned fellow hackers, this only applies if you have been in the slammer before.
- julianj 10y ago
  The article also references traffic violations - "Minor driving offences were incorrectly appearing as serious felonies"
  - the-dude 10y ago
    Ah, well. At least I skimmed the article. Was worried system admins were getting arrested about automatic updates and such.
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  There have also been instances of misdemeanours appearing as serious felonies in the system, according to the article.
- coldpie 10y ago
  I think it's OK to be concerned about the welfare of people who aren't me.
panic 10y ago
Tyler Technologies acknowledged in a statement that the upgrade process had been “challenging” - but said poor training was to blame for bad inputting of data and integration with third-party applications that often introduce glitches into the system. People writing software need to take responsibility for how the software is used, especially when it can impact people's lives to this degree. You can't just blame third party software or the people entering data.
- CmdrSprinkles 10y ago
  Except, what is the threshold? Are MS responsible for every time a 20 year old machine running windows 98 because nothing else can run the data collection software crashes? Should I give Linus a ring every time my aunt breaks her laptop that I installed Mint on? Assuming the software itself has no meaningful or significant bugs (a hard thing to prove), it likely IS a problem of training. I know that my travel request time went from 5 minutes to closer to an hour for the first few times I used it after we switched to a new system. And while the admins were trained properly, the rest of us just were told "Ask an admin if you need help" Similarly, it might actually BE the third party systems. I know that every time we upgrade part of our infrastructure we have to deal with the hell of components that should, but don't, interface well. And as often as I scream profanities and talk about how much I hate a certain vendor, I also know it isn't their responsibility to ensure that their software works with a different vendor's (I do yell at our procurement people though since they should make it so). Do I think Tyler Tech should try to help? Of course, this is bad PR. And if they were the ones providing the training, address what went wrong and update the training and possibly GUI to resolve this. But so long as they met the requirements of the contract, I see no reason they should be held responsible or penalized.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- noir_lord 10y ago
  > People writing software need to take responsibility for how the software is used There is an old joke that it's almost impossible to get someone to understand a problem that would result in a threat to their livliehood. I don't think people need to "take responsibility" I think organisations need to be made to take responsibility. In the UK when you purchase a physical good from the retailer the warranty for that good is between you and the retailer, the retailer then has to deal with problems up the line from suppliers, it's not perfect but it's workable. I think software should be the same, I think if I pay Foo for a system then Foo should be responsible for the system even if it's made of parts from Bar, Fizz and Buzz, if Foo has an issue with Fizz they need to take it up with Fizz. There is so much crap software out there in every field and the acceleration towards a world run on software continues.
tremon 10y ago
Not a system upgrade, but a faulty system. To which branch of the government should the court system be accountable?
- cafard 10y ago
  Umm, the courts? I knew various government techies who went to work for the Administrative Office of the [US] Courts. Honestly, I don't know what the chain of command was there.
luckystarr 10y ago
Kind of reminds me of Therac25. There a shitty user interface killed people. Here it "only" affects peoples lives in a dramatic manner. A shitty user interface ruined somebody's life. Consider that.
- icebraining 10y ago
  For those like me who didn't know the details: http://hackaday.com/2015/10/26/killed-by-a-machine-the-therac-25/ http://hackaday.com/2015/10/26/killed-by-a-machine-the-thera...
shadowban_me 10y ago
> However, this must be a co-operative process. A project’s success is contingent on both parties - the jurisdiction and the software provider - working co-operatively together. > “We have reiterated our commitment to this approach to Alameda and continue to make ourselves available to them.” Marketing speech for, "They don't even know how to ask us how bad we've fucked them." Just look at their company page, I think it's clear whats going on here. California administration is not capable of spending money wisely and Texas firms are not capable of not ripping off someone who is dependent on them. It's almost like a company build on internships can't really deliver a product, only a hole where their product should be, then when you fall in it, there they are on the lip of the hole saying here's a shovel, dig yourself out. It's a match made in capitalism-heaven.
eponeponepon 10y ago
I expect the truth of this lies somewhere in the outsourcing industry. It has every smell of miscommunicated requirements and half-assed implementation. If I'm right, I doubt it'll ever be admitted to though.
- briandear 10y ago
  I wish I could upvote this a hundred times. I am currently dealing with an Indian dev shop and the code has been atrocious -- as if they didn't even read the requirement. Doing a very basic Stripe integration has taken nearly a week and it was still incorrect. I could provide days of examples.
  - eponeponepon 10y ago
    The people writing your code have certainly not read the requirements. They'll each be working on one single aspect, and focussing entirely on fulfilling some knocked-together unit tests written by someone who might've read the requirements, but only with a view to working out how to make as much existing code as possible from the last customer fit into your project.
wtbob 10y ago
Although I don't have any direct evidence regarding this instance, I wouldn't be surprised if the old system was greenscreen & form-based, while the new one is some kind of shiny Java-backed web app. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the old system was faster to use and less error-prone: those old greenscreen apps tended to be optimised for long-term use, rather than for showing off in a board-room demo.
- hitgeek 10y ago
  having worked in data entry on a green screen app, as well as the .Net, Windows Form "upgrade", I agree with this sentiment. the green screen app was highly optimized for efficient and accurate data entry without use of a mouse. The modern alternative looked better, but a large portion of the functionality was much less efficient in comparison. the only redeeming factor of the new application, was it allowed much of the manual data entry to be automated. This however required considerable time, technical knowledge, and industry contacts to develop and implement, which not all organizational users possessed.
- daveleebbc 10y ago
  That's exactly the difference. Mr Woods (the defender I quote in the story) described the old system as something a computer hacker would use in a Hollywood movie... but it worked and was stable.
ttctciyf 10y ago
Anyone else put in mind of Gordon R Dickson's (1965!) classic: Computers Don't Argue[1] ? 1: http://www.dave.rainey.net/calendars/dystopias/process3.html http://www.dave.rainey.net/calendars/dystopias/process3.html
dkarl 10y ago
Similar problems have been reported in Tennessee and also in Indiana - where prosecutors have had a perhaps more troubling issue of inmates being mistakenly released early. It seems backwards to describe this as more troubling.
- egwynn 10y ago
  Relevant citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation
- briandear 10y ago
  Not at all. Do you want a rapist getting out of jail earlier? That would be troubling.
  - djrogers 10y ago
    Not as troubling as a government depriving a citizen of their inalienable rights. That is by far the more troubling outcome - especially given the greater societal implications.
  - brewdad 10y ago
    But a person with a traffic ticket getting jailed and registered as a sex offender is better? Both are equally troubling. In my mind, the latter moreso.
    - daveleebbc 10y ago
      Hm - I take your point. I was coming at it from a public safety point of view first and foremost. But I can see the other side, sure.
- strictfp 10y ago
  Better sorry than safe?
  - r00fus 10y ago
FrancoDiaz 10y ago
Holy Cow! There needs to be some serious consequences for those responsible for this travesty.
noir_lord 10y ago
Software is currently in a strange place legislatively, in the 18th century Civil Engineering exploded (sometimes literally) and the number of disasters went up in radically (for an interesting case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_Bridge_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_Bridge_disaster), over time professional standards bodies grew alongside the maturing industry to both ensure that people working in the industry where adequately trained and adequately protected from external factors (people pushing them to do things cheaply, skimp on designs etc). Given that we've handed a large part of the running of the modern world over to computers, software and the people who write that software I think at some point we need to start looking at a similar system, now the usual argument to this is "We don't want regulation" or "It's not my code, it's other peoples" but that doesn't alter the reality that this isn't going to get better until the way the industry is run changes, it's not a software issue, better tooling won't save us (it might help though) and there is no perfect outcome. EDIT: It's worth noting that if as an industry we don't work with our customers on this stuff and reach an accord that fits everyone eventually one will be imposed on us from outside, Software Engineering doesn't exist in isolation, other fields of Engineering are covered already.
- jdietrich 10y ago
  We need formal codes of practice, we need good institutions, but we also need a cultural change. We no longer have the luxury of saying "oh, it's just a CRUD app, it doesn't matter if things go wrong". Software has become too important, it has become too deeply intertwined in our daily lives. Errors and leaks from trivial little apps can have life-changing consequences for users. If your software handles personally identifying data, there's a non-zero chance that you could ruin someone's life through negligence. Legal case management software might be an obvious example, but it's the tip of a very big iceberg. If you have several million users, one-in-a-million edge cases are going to happen constantly. Weird things happen at scale. We need to treat every Android permission and every Facebook API call as a potential matter of life or death. We need the personal courage and the support of our peers to say "no, I will not implement that feature", "no, I will not store that user data", "no, I will not transmit that in plaintext", "no, I will not commit that to production without unit testing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring
danso 10y ago
> The software, created by Texas-based Tyler Technologies, costs about $5m (£4m) and is set to gradually replace a decades-old e-filing system that looks like something a hacker would use in a Hollywood movie. > Tyler Technologies acknowledged in a statement that the upgrade process had been “challenging” - but said poor training was to blame for bad inputting of data and integration with third-party applications that often introduce glitches into the system. Even as someone who spends the majority of the day at the command prompt, I agree we should always be attentive to user-interface issues. But I've been less than optimistic that people will have the wisdom to know that a new "modern" interface automatically means it's more sophisticated/elegant, or that it's more attuned to the needs of human users. In particular, it's been alarming to see a rise in unnecessary use of AJAX (nevermind Angular) in government applications. I'm not anti-JS, it's just that client-end development seems to have far more moving parts of the kind that don't get well-tested by workers in a bureaucracy. Especially when that work has been farmed out. edit: as an example of how government can do modern web-dev/UX well, I can think of no better (at least at the U.S. federal level) example than the CFPB: https://cfpb.github.io/ https://cfpb.github.io/
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
ptaipale 10y ago
The headline is somewhat clickbaity and sensational. Yes, it is bad that there are clerical errors in justice system. But, if information is lost due to faulty software or user errors or even user error helped by bad UI design, it's still fundamentally just a clerical error. Those errors should be fixed and perhaps some people should be eligible for compensation for being mistreated due to error, but there is no sinister "software is putting people in jail" plan here. Just errors. Embarrassing ones that should be fixed at a priority.
- avmich 10y ago
  The point here is perhaps that some errors are less forgivable than others. May be in the field like this some extra care should be taken to ensure that, despite possible clerical errors, the data entered is sufficiently accurate. Technically that's likely extra checks and more thoughts about clearness of UI. "Just clerical error" doesn't sound like enough justification in cases like this - software should actively help to avoid those errors, and do enough of that help.
- mtgx 10y ago
  > “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-new-software-system-blamed-for-10643452.php http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Alameda-County-s-...
  - ptaipale 10y ago
    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.
codedokode 10y ago
The problem with incorrect input and mistakes could be solved by entering the same data two times by two different people. It is probably not that expensive.
- avmich 10y ago
  It could be reduced this way, agree. But if a particularly bad UI is used in both cases, I'd assume it's quite possible to have duplication of errors here too. I don't think that's enough in all cases.
DannyB2 10y ago
Working as intended. Will not fix. Errors lead to keeping the for-profit prison cells more fully occupied. Even if merely temporary occupants. It doesn't matter as long as cell vacancy remains low. Revenue depends on having prison cells occupied. This leads to higher profits, executive bonuses and shareholder value.
jamesvl 10y ago
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]
sabujp 10y ago
why is the company the govt not being sued into oblivion?
forgotpwtomain 10y ago
I don't see why people in the comments are blaming tech company (Tyler Technologies) for this. There was certainly someone over-seeing procurement and specifications for the government and it was their job to make sure that the product which was procured and delivered was functional and ready to roll-out. This person and their department should be held responsible.
smnscu 10y ago
Oh, no, people's freedom is being jeopardised? That's terrible, BBC. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/30/investigatory_powers_act_backdoors/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/30/investigatory_powers...
- noir_lord 10y ago
  What does one have to do with the other? Does the UK passing the investigatory powers act in any way have any bearing on abuses by the legal system in other countries or are we just playing "whataboutism bingo" today?
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
If you care about the welfare of your fellow Californians, consider sending a letter to your U.S. Congressperson, your California State Assemblyperson and Senator [1]. Attach this article as an exhibit. Copy your county court. Then, and this is very important, set a reminder out one week and call each of those people, confirming they received the letter and understand your concerns. If this is too much, either accept you don't care about the issue (that's fine) or, if you do, that you may have wrong attitudes about how citizen influence works in a democracy. [1] http://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov http://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov
thinkcomp 10y ago
This stems directly from the opacity of the California Judicial Council Technology Committee and the CCMS debacle it has generally made worse. Public comments are welcome, but secret. http://www.courts.ca.gov/jctc.htm http://www.courts.ca.gov/jctc.htm
fataliss 10y ago
I don't get why such software isn't an open source initiative. I wish the government would give more legitimacy to orgs like "code for america". Who wants a proprietary closed janky software to rule wether you are a criminal or not? Nobody, that's who. The only beneficiaries in that story are the people on the other hand of the contract, making $5M for an half baked piece of software!
- splicer 10y ago
  While I certainly agree that all government software should be open source, it sounds like a big part of the problem here was a failure in gathering accurate requirements (which is a very expensive endeavor).
awinter-py 10y ago
Separate from the question of software liability is the court's responsibility to not make egregious errors. Historically, courts have been unwilling to assign themselves blame for screwing up. Judicial immunity is untouchable in american case law because it's hard to find a judge willing to rule against it. The standard of due process is high for 'life and limb' cases but low for misdemeanors & traffic violations. When Fixed discovered that most SF parking tickets are challengeable, SF didn't fix the problem -- they turned off their fax machine to make it harder to challenge tickets. https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/12/fixed-the-app-that-fixes-your-parking-tickets-gets-blocked-in-san-francisco-oakland-l-a/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/12/fixed-the-app-that-fixes-y... NYC issued fake parking tickets to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/144197004989/the-nypd-was-systematically-ticketing-legally http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/144197004989/the-nypd-was-sy... Jurisprudence doesn't have a concept of 'bulk miscarriage of justice'. You could put NSA surveillance in this camp too. There's a star trek line about genocide which says 'we have no law to fit your crime'. That's where we are with petty crimes mishandled in bulk.
threatofrain 10y ago
Perhaps I'm crazy, but isn't a $5 million contract a bit too low for an overhaul of the California justice software system? Business-wise there's going to be a lot of things to cut, pushback against government asks for software, and a very skeletal plan for maintenance mode. I sometimes wonder how government models the businesses they do work with, or whether they work as hard as businesses in modelling the other side.
joesmo 10y ago
Justice is whatever the 'justice' systems says it is. Citizens have no recourse. The 'justice' system has no checks or balances that can be accessed, except by the rich. There are no penalties for abuse or misuse, even when uncovered. Yeah, that's exactly what I think of when I think of the concept of 'justice'. One day some people might create a just society, but it almost certainly won't be in the US.
mVChr 10y ago
I'm so glad I don't have to only rely on a journalism source across the globe and can count on my local paper to warn me about such things. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Alatimes.com+tyler+technologies+software+upgrade&t=ffab&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Alatimes.com+tyler+technolog... /s
- daveleebbc 10y ago
  To be fair - it's been covered by the East Bay Times, SF Chron and KQED in some depth. That's how I heard about it.
kazinator 10y ago
> had recently finished a six-month drug programme after he was caught in possession of marijuana and ecstasy. THAT is what fucking should not have happened in the first place. Let's not shift the focus to some glitchy software issues that will likely get worked out.

260 points by dct 10y ago

the-dude 10y ago

tl; dr; No need to be concerned fellow hackers, this only applies if you have been in the slammer before.

julianj 10y ago
The article also references traffic violations - "Minor driving offences were incorrectly appearing as serious felonies"
- the-dude 10y ago
  Ah, well. At least I skimmed the article. Was worried system admins were getting arrested about automatic updates and such.
bryanlarsen 10y ago
There have also been instances of misdemeanours appearing as serious felonies in the system, according to the article.
coldpie 10y ago
I think it's OK to be concerned about the welfare of people who aren't me.

panic 10y ago

Tyler Technologies acknowledged in a statement that the upgrade process had been “challenging” - but said poor training was to blame for bad inputting of data and integration with third-party applications that often introduce glitches into the system. People writing software need to take responsibility for how the software is used, especially when it can impact people's lives to this degree. You can't just blame third party software or the people entering data.

CmdrSprinkles 10y ago
Except, what is the threshold? Are MS responsible for every time a 20 year old machine running windows 98 because nothing else can run the data collection software crashes? Should I give Linus a ring every time my aunt breaks her laptop that I installed Mint on? Assuming the software itself has no meaningful or significant bugs (a hard thing to prove), it likely IS a problem of training. I know that my travel request time went from 5 minutes to closer to an hour for the first few times I used it after we switched to a new system. And while the admins were trained properly, the rest of us just were told "Ask an admin if you need help" Similarly, it might actually BE the third party systems. I know that every time we upgrade part of our infrastructure we have to deal with the hell of components that should, but don't, interface well. And as often as I scream profanities and talk about how much I hate a certain vendor, I also know it isn't their responsibility to ensure that their software works with a different vendor's (I do yell at our procurement people though since they should make it so). Do I think Tyler Tech should try to help? Of course, this is bad PR. And if they were the ones providing the training, address what went wrong and update the training and possibly GUI to resolve this. But so long as they met the requirements of the contract, I see no reason they should be held responsible or penalized.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
noir_lord 10y ago
> People writing software need to take responsibility for how the software is used There is an old joke that it's almost impossible to get someone to understand a problem that would result in a threat to their livliehood. I don't think people need to "take responsibility" I think organisations need to be made to take responsibility. In the UK when you purchase a physical good from the retailer the warranty for that good is between you and the retailer, the retailer then has to deal with problems up the line from suppliers, it's not perfect but it's workable. I think software should be the same, I think if I pay Foo for a system then Foo should be responsible for the system even if it's made of parts from Bar, Fizz and Buzz, if Foo has an issue with Fizz they need to take it up with Fizz. There is so much crap software out there in every field and the acceleration towards a world run on software continues.

tremon 10y ago

Not a system upgrade, but a faulty system. To which branch of the government should the court system be accountable?

cafard 10y ago
Umm, the courts? I knew various government techies who went to work for the Administrative Office of the [US] Courts. Honestly, I don't know what the chain of command was there.

luckystarr 10y ago

Kind of reminds me of Therac25. There a shitty user interface killed people. Here it "only" affects peoples lives in a dramatic manner. A shitty user interface ruined somebody's life. Consider that.

icebraining 10y ago
For those like me who didn't know the details: http://hackaday.com/2015/10/26/killed-by-a-machine-the-therac-25/ http://hackaday.com/2015/10/26/killed-by-a-machine-the-thera...

shadowban_me 10y ago

> However, this must be a co-operative process. A project’s success is contingent on both parties - the jurisdiction and the software provider - working co-operatively together. > “We have reiterated our commitment to this approach to Alameda and continue to make ourselves available to them.” Marketing speech for, "They don't even know how to ask us how bad we've fucked them." Just look at their company page, I think it's clear whats going on here. California administration is not capable of spending money wisely and Texas firms are not capable of not ripping off someone who is dependent on them. It's almost like a company build on internships can't really deliver a product, only a hole where their product should be, then when you fall in it, there they are on the lip of the hole saying here's a shovel, dig yourself out. It's a match made in capitalism-heaven.

eponeponepon 10y ago

I expect the truth of this lies somewhere in the outsourcing industry. It has every smell of miscommunicated requirements and half-assed implementation. If I'm right, I doubt it'll ever be admitted to though.

briandear 10y ago
I wish I could upvote this a hundred times. I am currently dealing with an Indian dev shop and the code has been atrocious -- as if they didn't even read the requirement. Doing a very basic Stripe integration has taken nearly a week and it was still incorrect. I could provide days of examples.
- eponeponepon 10y ago
  The people writing your code have certainly not read the requirements. They'll each be working on one single aspect, and focussing entirely on fulfilling some knocked-together unit tests written by someone who might've read the requirements, but only with a view to working out how to make as much existing code as possible from the last customer fit into your project.

wtbob 10y ago

Although I don't have any direct evidence regarding this instance, I wouldn't be surprised if the old system was greenscreen & form-based, while the new one is some kind of shiny Java-backed web app. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the old system was faster to use and less error-prone: those old greenscreen apps tended to be optimised for long-term use, rather than for showing off in a board-room demo.

hitgeek 10y ago
having worked in data entry on a green screen app, as well as the .Net, Windows Form "upgrade", I agree with this sentiment. the green screen app was highly optimized for efficient and accurate data entry without use of a mouse. The modern alternative looked better, but a large portion of the functionality was much less efficient in comparison. the only redeeming factor of the new application, was it allowed much of the manual data entry to be automated. This however required considerable time, technical knowledge, and industry contacts to develop and implement, which not all organizational users possessed.
daveleebbc 10y ago
That's exactly the difference. Mr Woods (the defender I quote in the story) described the old system as something a computer hacker would use in a Hollywood movie... but it worked and was stable.

ttctciyf 10y ago

Anyone else put in mind of Gordon R Dickson's (1965!) classic: Computers Don't Argue[1] ? 1: http://www.dave.rainey.net/calendars/dystopias/process3.html http://www.dave.rainey.net/calendars/dystopias/process3.html

dkarl 10y ago

Similar problems have been reported in Tennessee and also in Indiana - where prosecutors have had a perhaps more troubling issue of inmates being mistakenly released early. It seems backwards to describe this as more troubling.

egwynn 10y ago
Relevant citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation
briandear 10y ago
Not at all. Do you want a rapist getting out of jail earlier? That would be troubling.
- djrogers 10y ago
  Not as troubling as a government depriving a citizen of their inalienable rights. That is by far the more troubling outcome - especially given the greater societal implications.
- brewdad 10y ago
  But a person with a traffic ticket getting jailed and registered as a sex offender is better? Both are equally troubling. In my mind, the latter moreso.
  - daveleebbc 10y ago
    Hm - I take your point. I was coming at it from a public safety point of view first and foremost. But I can see the other side, sure.
strictfp 10y ago
Better sorry than safe?
- r00fus 10y ago

FrancoDiaz 10y ago

Holy Cow! There needs to be some serious consequences for those responsible for this travesty.

noir_lord 10y ago

Software is currently in a strange place legislatively, in the 18th century Civil Engineering exploded (sometimes literally) and the number of disasters went up in radically (for an interesting case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_Bridge_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_Bridge_disaster), over time professional standards bodies grew alongside the maturing industry to both ensure that people working in the industry where adequately trained and adequately protected from external factors (people pushing them to do things cheaply, skimp on designs etc). Given that we've handed a large part of the running of the modern world over to computers, software and the people who write that software I think at some point we need to start looking at a similar system, now the usual argument to this is "We don't want regulation" or "It's not my code, it's other peoples" but that doesn't alter the reality that this isn't going to get better until the way the industry is run changes, it's not a software issue, better tooling won't save us (it might help though) and there is no perfect outcome. EDIT: It's worth noting that if as an industry we don't work with our customers on this stuff and reach an accord that fits everyone eventually one will be imposed on us from outside, Software Engineering doesn't exist in isolation, other fields of Engineering are covered already.

jdietrich 10y ago
We need formal codes of practice, we need good institutions, but we also need a cultural change. We no longer have the luxury of saying "oh, it's just a CRUD app, it doesn't matter if things go wrong". Software has become too important, it has become too deeply intertwined in our daily lives. Errors and leaks from trivial little apps can have life-changing consequences for users. If your software handles personally identifying data, there's a non-zero chance that you could ruin someone's life through negligence. Legal case management software might be an obvious example, but it's the tip of a very big iceberg. If you have several million users, one-in-a-million edge cases are going to happen constantly. Weird things happen at scale. We need to treat every Android permission and every Facebook API call as a potential matter of life or death. We need the personal courage and the support of our peers to say "no, I will not implement that feature", "no, I will not store that user data", "no, I will not transmit that in plaintext", "no, I will not commit that to production without unit testing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring

danso 10y ago

> The software, created by Texas-based Tyler Technologies, costs about $5m (£4m) and is set to gradually replace a decades-old e-filing system that looks like something a hacker would use in a Hollywood movie. > Tyler Technologies acknowledged in a statement that the upgrade process had been “challenging” - but said poor training was to blame for bad inputting of data and integration with third-party applications that often introduce glitches into the system. Even as someone who spends the majority of the day at the command prompt, I agree we should always be attentive to user-interface issues. But I've been less than optimistic that people will have the wisdom to know that a new "modern" interface automatically means it's more sophisticated/elegant, or that it's more attuned to the needs of human users. In particular, it's been alarming to see a rise in unnecessary use of AJAX (nevermind Angular) in government applications. I'm not anti-JS, it's just that client-end development seems to have far more moving parts of the kind that don't get well-tested by workers in a bureaucracy. Especially when that work has been farmed out. edit: as an example of how government can do modern web-dev/UX well, I can think of no better (at least at the U.S. federal level) example than the CFPB: https://cfpb.github.io/ https://cfpb.github.io/

deleted 10y ago
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ptaipale 10y ago

The headline is somewhat clickbaity and sensational. Yes, it is bad that there are clerical errors in justice system. But, if information is lost due to faulty software or user errors or even user error helped by bad UI design, it's still fundamentally just a clerical error. Those errors should be fixed and perhaps some people should be eligible for compensation for being mistreated due to error, but there is no sinister "software is putting people in jail" plan here. Just errors. Embarrassing ones that should be fixed at a priority.

avmich 10y ago
The point here is perhaps that some errors are less forgivable than others. May be in the field like this some extra care should be taken to ensure that, despite possible clerical errors, the data entered is sufficiently accurate. Technically that's likely extra checks and more thoughts about clearness of UI. "Just clerical error" doesn't sound like enough justification in cases like this - software should actively help to avoid those errors, and do enough of that help.
mtgx 10y ago
> “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-new-software-system-blamed-for-10643452.php http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Alameda-County-s-...
- ptaipale 10y ago
  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.

codedokode 10y ago

The problem with incorrect input and mistakes could be solved by entering the same data two times by two different people. It is probably not that expensive.

avmich 10y ago
It could be reduced this way, agree. But if a particularly bad UI is used in both cases, I'd assume it's quite possible to have duplication of errors here too. I don't think that's enough in all cases.

DannyB2 10y ago

Working as intended. Will not fix. Errors lead to keeping the for-profit prison cells more fully occupied. Even if merely temporary occupants. It doesn't matter as long as cell vacancy remains low. Revenue depends on having prison cells occupied. This leads to higher profits, executive bonuses and shareholder value.

jamesvl 10y ago

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]

sabujp 10y ago

why is the company the govt not being sued into oblivion?

forgotpwtomain 10y ago

I don't see why people in the comments are blaming tech company (Tyler Technologies) for this. There was certainly someone over-seeing procurement and specifications for the government and it was their job to make sure that the product which was procured and delivered was functional and ready to roll-out. This person and their department should be held responsible.

smnscu 10y ago

Oh, no, people's freedom is being jeopardised? That's terrible, BBC. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/30/investigatory_powers_act_backdoors/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/30/investigatory_powers...

noir_lord 10y ago
What does one have to do with the other? Does the UK passing the investigatory powers act in any way have any bearing on abuses by the legal system in other countries or are we just playing "whataboutism bingo" today?

JumpCrisscross 10y ago

If you care about the welfare of your fellow Californians, consider sending a letter to your U.S. Congressperson, your California State Assemblyperson and Senator [1]. Attach this article as an exhibit. Copy your county court. Then, and this is very important, set a reminder out one week and call each of those people, confirming they received the letter and understand your concerns. If this is too much, either accept you don't care about the issue (that's fine) or, if you do, that you may have wrong attitudes about how citizen influence works in a democracy. [1] http://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov http://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov

thinkcomp 10y ago

This stems directly from the opacity of the California Judicial Council Technology Committee and the CCMS debacle it has generally made worse. Public comments are welcome, but secret. http://www.courts.ca.gov/jctc.htm http://www.courts.ca.gov/jctc.htm

fataliss 10y ago

I don't get why such software isn't an open source initiative. I wish the government would give more legitimacy to orgs like "code for america". Who wants a proprietary closed janky software to rule wether you are a criminal or not? Nobody, that's who. The only beneficiaries in that story are the people on the other hand of the contract, making $5M for an half baked piece of software!

splicer 10y ago
While I certainly agree that all government software should be open source, it sounds like a big part of the problem here was a failure in gathering accurate requirements (which is a very expensive endeavor).

awinter-py 10y ago

Separate from the question of software liability is the court's responsibility to not make egregious errors. Historically, courts have been unwilling to assign themselves blame for screwing up. Judicial immunity is untouchable in american case law because it's hard to find a judge willing to rule against it. The standard of due process is high for 'life and limb' cases but low for misdemeanors & traffic violations. When Fixed discovered that most SF parking tickets are challengeable, SF didn't fix the problem -- they turned off their fax machine to make it harder to challenge tickets. https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/12/fixed-the-app-that-fixes-your-parking-tickets-gets-blocked-in-san-francisco-oakland-l-a/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/12/fixed-the-app-that-fixes-y... NYC issued fake parking tickets to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/144197004989/the-nypd-was-systematically-ticketing-legally http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/144197004989/the-nypd-was-sy... Jurisprudence doesn't have a concept of 'bulk miscarriage of justice'. You could put NSA surveillance in this camp too. There's a star trek line about genocide which says 'we have no law to fit your crime'. That's where we are with petty crimes mishandled in bulk.

threatofrain 10y ago

Perhaps I'm crazy, but isn't a $5 million contract a bit too low for an overhaul of the California justice software system? Business-wise there's going to be a lot of things to cut, pushback against government asks for software, and a very skeletal plan for maintenance mode. I sometimes wonder how government models the businesses they do work with, or whether they work as hard as businesses in modelling the other side.

joesmo 10y ago

Justice is whatever the 'justice' systems says it is. Citizens have no recourse. The 'justice' system has no checks or balances that can be accessed, except by the rich. There are no penalties for abuse or misuse, even when uncovered. Yeah, that's exactly what I think of when I think of the concept of 'justice'. One day some people might create a just society, but it almost certainly won't be in the US.

mVChr 10y ago

I'm so glad I don't have to only rely on a journalism source across the globe and can count on my local paper to warn me about such things. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Alatimes.com+tyler+technologies+software+upgrade&t=ffab&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Alatimes.com+tyler+technolog... /s

daveleebbc 10y ago
To be fair - it's been covered by the East Bay Times, SF Chron and KQED in some depth. That's how I heard about it.

kazinator 10y ago

> had recently finished a six-month drug programme after he was caught in possession of marijuana and ecstasy. THAT is what fucking should not have happened in the first place. Let's not shift the focus to some glitchy software issues that will likely get worked out.