Microsoft exposes green users' privates in web quiz snafu Microsoft has plugged a flaw in its Greener IT Challenge website that leaked the names and email addresses of users who took a quiz on the site. Users who passed the quiz by demonstrating their knowledge of buying environmentally sensitive PCs, choosing minimal power use options for new computers and how to dispose of obsolete …
A lot of that has to do with the rather popular decision (right now) to 'empower' individual departments by allowing them to create applications and publish to corporate websites without any IT oversight.
I guarantee you when this was discovered someone in IT got a panic call & had to race to correct what is a simple issue for IT but beyond the purview of green computing department.
Fail - the agency probably hired some cheap students or other code monkeys, charged good mana from MS, paid nothing for the workforce internally. PROFIT!
Fail2 - microsofties did not even bother to check if they got what they paid for... and I am sorry, but such classics are in every "let me code a web page" book.
Its not like a project from a course or a programming book where you are given 100% complete and 100% accurate specifications to work with. Usually the boss/client has no idea what they want until they see it. So you create a series of quick and dirty prototypes until you come up with something that client is happy with.
Ideally what happens next is you cleanup/rewrite/refactor the code adding "invisible" features like security, legibility, ease of maintenance, etc to bring it up to full production standards. And then you spend some time testing and debugging until you are confident you have created something you that makes you take pride in your work.
Then the client's bosses boss who knows as much about programming as you know about marketing decides to make a few "minor" changes the day before everything goes live.
If you were working on something like an air traffic control program your company would refuse to compromise quality, and present the client with a revised budget and time table, and there would be a contract that would back them up.
Since this is just a stupid online quiz, and contract or no contract if the client isn't happy your not going to get that last big check. So you and your team work all day, then ingest a lot of sugar and caffeine and work all night until finally you go something that quick and dirty, and completely untested but it works well enough to make the client happy, at least until the check clears.
...And that's exactly how the world works - the marketing agencies they use promise to be responsive whereas in-house IT have to follow the rules and standards. I assure you, the in-house IT procedures and standards are incredibly high, with security audits mandatory, etc.
It's called the V-Model. Essentially you start with a specification and then you refine it more and more until you actually code. Then that code will be tested against the specification. This leads to horrible software since a mistake in the specification will cause mistakes in the implementation. And should the programmer notice it and fix it, he will have made an error.
In the V-Model someone would probably have simply declared the filenames of the PDF-files to be the number of the main index in the database.
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