The clock change bug
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 7:51 pm, apps
If you commute in those new trains, you may have noticed their new and shiny system which shows you in which village you are and when you will arrive in the next station.
However, since the clock change 18 days ago, it just doesnt work anymore: Sometimes it displays three different times on the same screen, the ‘next stop’ field is wrong or the driver just turned it off and announce the stations by his own.
We all create software and know how hard it is to keep those little things in mind which could make our software fail. I was not very surprised when I saw it the first time, but that was almost one and a half years ago!
I wonder what those guys at sbb are doing (maybe they outsourced it to Swisscom IT Services (they grow by buying other companies and fail when they have to deliver on time because it’s all mixed up)) There was a bug a long time ago, its easy reproduceable and it’s around until today.
Still, it’s a wonderful example for the type of dev who just press ‘run’ in his editor to see if his program is okay and then hope he did enough testing.
November 15th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
sometimes the little ones are the most difficult ones ;)
November 15th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Isn’t it done by Siemens?
You should ignore that and just be happy it’s just that which fails from time to time.
In the beginning the WC doors kept opening while people were inside or those lifts under the door “forgot” to slide out.
I think they can’t reproduce it that easily. Maybe they have to load the software onto real train hardware to test it.
November 16th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
@giu
yeye ;) we’ll see it tomorrow :S
@reto
…or when the doors got blocked and don’t open for a few minutes :D They gave us really crappy trains. Hopefully they have some software patches ready.
uhhh.. that would explain why they are bringing out patches so slowely. I hope they built a simulator. If not, they are doomed anyway.