The State Department of the US has inflicted unimaginable pain and suffering on tens of thousands of people throughout the world through their electronic Diversity Immigrant Visa program. It's a highly visible and public example of what's wrong with software development in general, and software quality in particular. Sadly, it's no different in principle from countless numbers of other projects, doomed from inception by inappropriate standards and techniques.
The Facts
The Diversity Lottery Program is just that -- a lottery. More than ten million non-US-citizens worldwide apply for tens of thousands of slots that can lead to US citizenship. Only this time, after notifying the "winners," who started spending money most of them didn't have to comply with the requirements to complete the process, the State Department cancelled the lottery and invalidated the results. Why? A bug in the computer program that chose the winners.
The Human Consequences
From the Wall Street Journal:
Ever since he traveled from his home near Yaounde, Cameroon, on a scholarship to Michigan State University in 2009, Dieudonné Kuate dreamed of immigrating to the United States.
As a visiting graduate student in epidemiology, he marveled at the sophistication of the chemistry labs and the excellence of the teaching. There was no comparison to his university in Yaounde, where he shared a cramped 27-square-foot room with three other students.
One of eight children, Mr. Kuate grew up on a poor farm in the western plateau town of Banjoun. His parents couldn't read or write. Mr. Kuate is the only child in his family to complete university. "My dreams have been to be a top researcher in my field of specialty. The only place I see these goals being realized is the United States," says the 31-year-old Mr. Kuate, who returned to Yaounde last year and finished his Ph.D. in chemistry.
For the past six years, Mr. Kuate has applied for the State Department's annual green-card lottery, and, like 15 million other people, he applied again this year. The 20-year-old program offers about 50,000 people a year a chance to win permanent residence in the U.S.—and a ticket to the American Dream.
Denied six times, Mr. Kuate finally saw his number come up on May 1.
"There is no English word to express my happiness when I discovered that I was selected," said Mr. Kuate, whose first name means "God given."
Emmanuel Tumanjong for The Wall Street Journal
Within days, his older brother sold family land in Banjoun for around $4,400 for Mr. Kuate to use for application fees, medical examinations and to start a new life in the U.S., he said. His mother believed God had intervened: "According to her, I was going to travel to the white man's country and see how to help other family members who have not gone far in book work," he said.
But on May 13, those hopes were abruptly dashed. After logging on to the State Department website, Mr. Kuate said, "I saw a message saying the lottery had been canceled."
Mr. Kuate was among 22,000 people around the world mistakenly informed last month that they had won the lottery. There had been a technical glitch and the lottery would have to be held again, the State Department said, explaining that a computer had selected 90% of the winners from the first two days of the application window instead of the full 30-day registration period.
The software
It's pretty clear that this is one of the more trivial programming jobs on the planet. I shudder to think how much it cost to build, how long it took, and the whole environment that was created that made it (I'm sorry to say) likely that a horrific bug like this would be inflicted on so many innocent people.
Since I have no access to the code or project documents, I will comment on a couple of things that are publicly available.
Take a look at the Department's page that announces the status of the 2012 lottery. Play around with it a bit, as I did.
Did you want to find more information? Did you take advantage of the kind offer to provide more information:
More information is available on our website:
Perhaps, then, you noticed that the link leads you to the same page you're already reading!! Kafka couldn't have done it better. No doubt this was the careful work of the Division of Self-referential self-reference of the Department of Redundancy Department.
Did you take note of the fact that all entries were submitted electronically between October 5, 2010 and November 3, 2010? Which implies that starting on November 4, 2010, they had all their input data? All they had to do was run the lottery program a couple times on the input, run some checks to make sure it was working properly on the new data set, then run it "for real" and publish the results. To be generous, this should have taken about a day. OK, it's the government, we'll give them a week. Really? Geeez...alright, a month! No. NO WAY. $%&$%^& SIX MONTHS!!!!??? ^&(^^&* MORE THAN SIX MONTHS???!!!
With that much time, this should have been the most proven-to-be-perfect program in history. PhD students should have been able to break new ground in proving the certainty of correctness of this program. It should have been possible to run it a number of times that compares favorably to the number of grains of sand on all the beaches on planet earth.
I love the fact that there's a transcript of a statement on the subject by "David Donahue, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Visa Services." The statement location and date are unspecified. The date of posting is not given. The fact that he made a statement verbally rather than just talking with the public via the web site kind of implies that he's incapable of writing or typing. His "internet department" (or whatever) must be responsible for the web site. And it implies that he still has a job! For some reason, I find that one really annoying! I guess you can screw over incredible numbers of people on behalf of the US Government and suffer no personal consequences. It must be OK to do that!
There's a lot more to be said about this fiasco, but I'm tired.
Conclusion
Software quality. We need a revolution! Stop the Horror! End the Terror!
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