[tz] Epic fail for DST fallback in hospital health records

Michael Douglass mikeadouglass at gmail.com
Thu Nov 8 05:52:58 UTC 2018



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.




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