On 11/6/18 17:04, Lester Caine wrote:
On 06/11/2018 20:21, Hal Murray wrote:
My reading on this whole mess is that the medical community doesn't take testing software seriously. It may be as simple as senior executives with budget problems aren't willing to pay for testing because they don't understand that you have to do lots of it if you expect your systems to work reliably.
The fact that the developers have made no provision for a well known problem is simple incompetence, and I would not be surprised if they were found liable if anybody was killed. Yes the software needs testing, but the simple operational requirements should not need to be explicitly specified in the specifications? ANYBODY designing a system that has essentially to work 24/7 and perhaps as a patient is being transferred across timezones should not be an area where they simply don't bother about using a stable timing system? But then if they are using windows anyway perhaps they don't even know that the clock changes sometimes?
As ever it's not as simple as that. Much of this software comes from mainframe days when these problems were not so 'well known'. I doubt there were any specifications and nobody thought about transferring patients across timezones. If you get (even peripherally) involved in the debate about updating or replacing these systems you'll find that it quickly degenerates into politics. As ever the developers get the blame but they are rarely allowed to fix the issues.