Shoddy Programming

[Ghel]

Omigawd, I just totally snarked at my contact for the loan module of this software. I hope that doesn't bite me in the ass.

As I mentioned in the OP, I emailed her about the issues with the grant form. She asked me how it should be brought up. I responded that it made the most sense to have it choose the state of the grant form by the customer's address, since everywhere else, the collateral location defaults to the customer's address. I also complained about it not filling in the date of the security agreement (another of the documents the software prepares), and she asked me to mark up a copy and email it to her, showing what I'd like to see programmed in.

I emailed it to her this morning, along with a copy of another form that we're still having issues with on real estate loans. I ended my email with "Thanks for continuing to work with us to get the software to a usable state."

[TheSHAD0W]

I've got a fancy new monitor set to high resolution. I love it, but all the text was really tiny. So I went into the Windows settings and turned up the font size. Problem solved, right? Well, not with the crappy software. That little window inside my browser now has 2 sets of scroll bars! I can use my mouse wheel for most of the up/down scrolling, but the left/right scroll bars are a real pain.

Go into settings again, switch the font size back to normal, then turn the monitor resolution down. If it's 1920x1080 full HD, try 1280x720. Most monitors will accommodate the setting by resizing and making it fit the display. This should make it easier to work with.

[Ghel]

Go into settings again, switch the font size back to normal, then turn the monitor resolution down.

I like the resolution my monitor is at. But I did discover that if I zoom in within Chrome, it makes the UI window bigger without changing the font size. Weird, but it works.

[mhkohne]

I like the resolution my monitor is at. But I did discover that if I zoom in within Chrome, it makes the UI window bigger without changing the font size. Weird, but it works.

Because the web page and the scripts running on the page have a lot of different ways it can specify sizes of the fonts and such, browser zooming of the page is a crapshoot. Nice that this time it worked out in your favor.

[otakuneko]

When I (and others - I've heard people make similar statements during training) have complained about the user interface, the trainer's response has been that they need to get the software functional first, then they'll work on the user interface. Wait, don't those things go hand in hand? And why are you releasing software that you know isn't functional?

On that note, when I was writing code I'd always put minimal effort into the UI until the logic worked. No sense building the shell of a corvette around a non-functional two-cycle engine.

In a regular application this meant either console (text) or barebones, barely-interactive GUI output. In a web app, this meant just definining a few html form elements at most and letting them fall where they may.

It sounds like my "development UI" would be better than what actually ended up in their software.

Actually, it sounds a lot like the annoying, entirely flash-based (ARGH) web application used by the Texas Department of Health and Human Services. It appears in a fixed-size area within the browser window, much like you describe. Scrolling is a pain. And it's also so slow I have to wonder if it's not a Flash UI on top of a Java back-end.

[EricKei]

otaku - Fair enough The issue here seems to be that the proggers didn't really even make a *functional* UI at all. Heck, would it not have required extra effort to restrict a browser element to a specific size/box like that? All they really needed was "text fields," "display fields", and 2 or 3 basic buttons to start. "Working" comes first; "Pretty" can wait

[Ghel]

The UI isn't even laid out logically.

It asks for the same information multiple times. For example, it asks whether the address is a PO box, a physical address, or an AFO/APO when you're entering the customer information, then on the CIP (Customer Identification Program) screen, it asks again.

One of the options for the customer "role" on the customer information screen is "beneficiary," but you don't enter beneficiaries there. If an account has a beneficiary, you enter it under the account title screen.

When you first set up a loan, you use the main navigation buttons to go to the next screen to enter the borrower information. But after you first enter it, a button appears on the main screen saying "review participants," which you have to click to review or correct any information about the borrower(s). If you use the main navigation buttons to go to the next screen later, it takes you to the print list.

There's no indication of what you've completed and what you haven't on most screens. If you're entering the customer information and forget to enter their social security number (which is very easy to do, since it's in a weird place), it doesn't remind you. So you can easily get to your documents and have them print without social security numbers. But it reminds you if you don't choose a "role" for a customer.

Also under no indication of what you've completed, when you're doing a loan, you have to click a button to enter the details of the loan. Then you have to click another button to enter the collateral and a third to enter the actual loan details. If you get interrupted while typing up the loan, there's no way to tell if you've completed a section without clicking through about a dozen screens to make sure they're all filled in.

When you're telling it the owners of the collateral, it has a button to fill with the first borrower's information, but if you need to add a second owner, you can't tell it to fill with the second borrower's information.

It seems obvious that nobody on the software development team has ever worked as a loan officer.

[BPFH]

It seems obvious that nobody on the software development team has ever worked as a loan officer.

...and then, when the programmers work to the spec, they lack the knowledge of the problem domain to determine that the spec is crap. Yep, sounds about right.

Or if they do know the spec is crap, they may not have the internal political power to push back to get a non-crap spec, and so...

[bankworking]

I love our new loan software.

I knew I liked it better than our old software (except for one or two, very minor, areas that are easy to get over).

After reading about your experience, I realize how very lucky I am that I have a loan platform that makes sense.

[Ghel]

It's the last day of the month. The last day of our old loan software. Tomorrow, we will no longer be able to use it. We must use the new loan software.

For the most part, this isn't a big deal. I've primarily been using the new software all month. The issues I've discussed here are still issues, but one thing that I emailed my contact at the software company about still hasn't been resolved. As far as I can tell, they haven't even looked at it.

When a customer's mortgage balloons, we complete a Modification of Mortgage, which is recorded with the county as an attachment to the original Mortgage. It means we can do a renewal of a customer's mortgage without losing our lien position (for example, if the customer has a second mortgage). The software has a checkbox for a Modification. It has a separate screen to complete the information on the Modification document. But when you get to the print list, the document isn't there.

When I emailed my contact on the 2nd, she said she'd talk to the development team about it. When I emailed her again yesterday, she acted like it was the first she'd heard about it. Her solution is to use the blank document available on their website until they get it programmed into the software.

The only conclusion I can draw is that they're incompetent.

ETA: Ugh! Even the blank, fillable pdf of the Modification has fields linked together so that the bank name filled in one field copies into a field that's supposed to be a number! Totally incompetent!

[Dreamstalker]

When we did the original training, there were multiple places where the trainer hit an error, then just clicked through it to continue the training.

That sounds like what we went through with the new POS. Most of what the other cashiers know about how to work around and fix various errors they got from me, after I hit said errors and made the (not so far) leap of logiccommon sense required to make it work.

[Ghel]

I discovered another mind-boggling issue with the software today. On a small loan that I did this week, I set up automatic payments for the customer. On the loan note, the payment amount is one amount, and on the automatic payment form, it's a penny more. The software prepares both documents, how could it not know the payment amount from one form to another?

[Gizmo]

My guess would be rounding. Each document works it out independently and its not stored centrally as one calculation. One document is set to round down and one to round up and the payment is just on the half way between mark.....

[EricKei]

I have a related horror story to that last one -- While this may have been fixed in the 2-3 years since I did accounting software support -- "RapidTomes" has both a (pretty decent) accounting package and a (rather non-decent) POS package. A POS POS, if you will. While they can be linked together such that summary data from the latter uploads to the former as needed, each program calculates taxes independently, in two different ways. Yes, this means that the exact same transaction, rung up on one program or the other could have two different tax totals. >_<

[Cia]

They aren't errors they are "features".

When I've complained on the accounting forums for Sage Software about the extra clicks you have to do when entering checks in A/R I get back "that what the programmer programmed it to do". That's the problem! I don't need the cursor to land on the tab field I need it to go to the next entry point.

They finally made it so your A/R customer accounts can have 20 digit names it used to be 9. Since our customer names start with a two number state designation that left me 7 digits to use. I live in the Black Hills area do you know how many customers I have that start with 00BH*****? Than you have hotels and churches with the same name in different towns - there are only so many ways to shorten Holiday Inn, Super 8, St. Joseph, St. Anthony and etc to be able to include a town name or letter. It gets very difficult to create customer names that are easy to remember.

Unfortunately they didn't expand the A/P customer names and I'm still stuck with 7 available digits to use.