software development

The Story Of A2LL

A2LL – the German social services and unemployment software system was developed over the course of several years by T-Systems - a software department of state telecommunications company – along with ProSoz, a smaller company of about thirty developers located in the town of Herten.

The final product was delivered in the last quarter of 2004 and went live on January 1, 2005. The system consisted of the web browser front end, while the back end was based on 16 servers with 4 processors each.

Upon the deployment of the system at several large German cities including Cologne, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Berlin, the users at the welfare offices started reporting serious problems with the software.  Some of the problems encountered are listed in Exhibit 1.

 

Exhibit 1

System Bug Description	Type of Requirement
If data entered into the form was incomplete (e.g. someone missed one of the many questions) the system automatically deleted the record after about three or four weeks	Functional
Account numbers that were less than ten digits in length were filled with zeros at the end of the string rather than at the beginning (e.g. 3225223 became 3225223000 instead of 0003225223).	Functional
System was not capable of producing an “Analysis of Variance” report	Functional
System was not capable of producing a “Persons Who Received Too Much Money” report	Functional
System did not include the functionality to deal with the deductions for income from small jobs	Functional