Crazy.
1. There's a My Aged Care application creating user records that doesn't sanitise leading spaces, so any surname can be entered as ' Surname' without error.
2. Meanwhile the My Aged Care wizard allowing you to link the service to MyGov—provided you can confirm your identifying data—refuses to match 'Surname' with ' Surname'.
3. If you call the national My Aged Care helpdesk, they transfer you to the development team and manually update the record.
Quite a shameful bug to appear in a system that would have had a well-resourced test team during implementation.
My mum's not a confident Internet user. Because of this bug she's been in a state of confusion *correctly* entering identifying data two different ways (Aged Care ID and Medicare Number) for a few hours and getting errors.
She's trying to link her record on behalf of my dad, a mini-stroke victim who's become very loath to attempt this kind of task.
I'm a contract programmer who often works as a ring-in on government projects, so I do know how these things go and why these bugs can appear.
However, I often see telltale signs the practice level on federal software projects is disturbingly low.
When you have intuition about these things, you feel disturbed by things like the recent reporting on the rebuild of ~30 ASIC registries having tapped out at a $2bn budget (That's a few systems, but it's also $66m per database!)
The features of this ASIC registries rebuild story are absolutely paradigmatic:
* International body shop wins contract
* Massive dollars chewed by "high-level design"
* "Tender killer" COTS platform does not perform and is hard to integrate
* Economies of scale forecast from multi-system build lead to huge overspend on just a single system
Even given that predictability, it's still an absurd scale (500 full time staff?!)
https://www.innovationaus.com/burning-12m-a-month-govt-scraps-business-register-overhaul/
The Albanese government has scrapped a major upgrade of the country's business registers after an independent review found it would cost up to $2.2 billion to complete the project – five times what had been budgeted by the Coalition. But the government will still be forced to spend at least $400 million at a later date to stabilise existing legacy systems, in addition to the $430 million that has already been sunk on the troubled program designed to consolidate Australia’s 30-odd business registers. Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones revealed the government’s decision on the modernising business register (MBR) program on Monday, following a six-month review led by former Service NSW chief executive Damon Rees.
Tom