Software Testing Blog

It’s back to the basics for the US Census. After several failed attempts to “modernize” the national headcount with hand held computers, officials are now blaming the resulting confusion, delays and costs on – wait for it – software bugs. You can read more about it here. To save you some time, I’ve summarized the progress made along the way with some telling quotations from those in the know:

Phase I: “Critical software errors are increasing; system performance is still lagging and testing continues to be compressed. A shortfall in testing portends potentially significant technical problems in the field.” – John Thompson, former associate director of the Census Bureau

Phase II: “The testing of the system is continuing to reveal critical defects.” – Todd Zinser, Commerce Department Inspector General

Phase III: “The performance of this system is not taking the load we’d like. It’s not going to accept the load that we will need to get it in about a month or so.” – Robert Groves, Census Director

Results: “They have prepared to do the follow-up using pencil and paper, and they’re very good at that.” – John Thompson (again)

Of course, software companies cannot simply revert back to paper and pencils when they hit a snag in their development. Twitter, for instance, can’t ask users to send chain letters when the fail whale shows up! Companies either find a way to release functional, quality software at a reasonable cost – or their competition will gladly do it for them.

Interestingly, Census officials did conduct a “mock test” of the system’s infrastructure last December, having 8,000 workers across the country simultaneously entering data to see if the system would hold up under peak usage. It didn’t. (Shameless plug: As you might have noticed, this is somewhat similar to the load testing services we offer at uTest, albeit for a few million dollars less).

And speaking of which, it should come as no surprise that Census bugs are some of the costliest defects around. From the WSJ:

Zinser testified yesterday, warning that possible solutions must be tested and implemented in a hurry if the bureau doesn’t want to spend more than the projected $14.7 billion total cost of the census…

Already, the bureau shelled out an extra $88 million for another IT goof: a payroll software glitch that led to $300 payments each to thousands of temporary hires who performed little or no work.

A few million here, a few billion there – but who’s counting?