The New York Giants web staff committed a major gaffe on Saturday and may have given the Patriots some bulletin board material for the Super Bowl.

On Saturday, NYGiants.com posted an ad on their website declaring the Giants Super Bowl Champions.

The ad also contained a link to buy championship merchandise.

Someone eventually noticed the error and took down the ad.

Unfortunately, it was a prophetic defect.

Where was I? Oh, yes. I was talking about trusting your application, particularly one with complicated rules whose violation might result in a prison sentence. You want to trust that application, don’t you? So do I.

But I get the software installed and get into the mandatory registration (that is, give us personal information so we can target more in-application advertising pop-ups to you), and I get confronted with obvious slops on the design.

To whit:

A couple missing lines and slurred text, probably caused by poor compression or sizing.

Next up:

A stray bracket in the corner.

Man, oh man, I can’t wait to find out what strange punctuation marks it leaves in my figures.

Do I trust the application? Not so much. Which is why I don’t use it for much more than a glorified check register. And if it continues with its unrepentant, unrelenting barrage of “Collect credit cards with Intuit!”, “Print checks with Intuit!”, “Let Intuit have access to all your financial accounts!” banners popping up before I can pay my bills, I won’t have to trust it in the future, as I move to Microsoft Excel where it’s nice and quiet.

Take the Progressive Insurance contact us form:

Now, if you don’t select a topic before you click Submit, it asks for a topic. But only a topic

When you select a topic, it changes the fields on the form to reflect what they want for that kind of inquiry (enquiry for our R.P. friends). If you click Submit then, it shows you a list of the fields you need to fill out:

But if you click the Reset button to reset the form, well, that’s not cricket (cricket for our R.P. friends):

You know, any time your form changes the controls on the screen due to AJAX or other techniques, it’s a different form. And it never hurts to check your reset button in various forms of filling out the form, especially if there are look-ups or state changes as you fill out the form.

UPDATE: Welcome, Progressive Insurance readers!

How many prescriptions are affected?

90,000,000:

An Express Scripts spokesman say their customers previously filled 90 million prescriptions at Walgreens. Now they’re taking them elsewhere.

It’s my understanding that the Express Scripts processing system was down all day on January 11. Is it related? I don’t know.

But I do wonder whether Express Scripts load tested its system to handle 90,000,000 change orders in a matter of days while handling its normal processing for all other normal maintenance.

It could be a valuable lesson anyway: Even after you’ve load tested your application to the limits of your budget for virtual users or to a level where the stakeholders are comfortable with very gradual ramp up times, sometimes events out of IT’s control could lead to a catastrophic meltdown.

After destroying 99% of the first city (what, I missed some part up to 1%?), I got an error:

What? There are other lockup errors one can find? I’ll have to try them to collect them all!

While I do that, join me in recasting the lyrics to this song to fit the occasion. Consider it your Friday software testing exercise:

Assertions by the prosecution that Casey Anthony conducted extensive computer searches on the word “chloroform” were based on inaccurate data, a software designer who testified at the trial said Monday.

The designer, John Bradley, said Ms. Anthony had visited what the prosecution said was a crucial Web site only once, not 84 times, as prosecutors had asserted. He came to that conclusion after redesigning his software, and immediately alerted prosecutors and the police about the mistake, he said.

…

Concerned that the analysis using CacheBack could be wrong and that a woman’s life might be at stake, Mr. Bradley went back to the drawing board and redesigned a portion of his software to get a more accurate picture.

He found both reports were inaccurate (although NetAnalysis came up with the correct result), in part because it appears both types of software had failed to fully decode the entire file, due to its complexity. His more thorough analysis showed that the Web site sci-spot.com was visited only once — not 84 times.

Remember, those defects your developers mark as “Known Issue” or reject still can have real-world effects.

Whether it’s caused by a power failure or a possum, an airline computer outage unleashes more problems more quickly than similar breakdowns in almost any other consumer business.

A recent spate of technology glitches at U.S. airlines has inconvenienced thousands of travelers, spawned long airport lines, delayed or canceled flights and led to a wave of negative publicity.

United Continental Holdings Inc.’s United Airlines unit suffered a meltdown June 17 that forced it to cancel 36 flights and delay another 100. US Airways Group Inc. was hit by separate glitches on June 10, 18 and 19.

Alaska Air Group Inc. had its turn back in March, canceling 150 flights affecting more than 12,000 customers. Earlier in March, Southwest Airlines Co. experienced two separate technical foul-ups within two days, although the one related to the rollout of its revamped frequent-flier program didn’t delay flights.

With packed planes leaving little room for error, airlines are trying myriad upgrades and other solutions to keep their computers running everything from flight dispatching to crew scheduling, passenger check-ins, airport-departure boards, ticket sales and frequent-flier programs.

Cascading failures caused by unforeseen, unrelated, or untested circumstances. Now you know why some of us use milk of Magnesia as our coffee cream.

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).

I sent a screen capture to the author – who was appropriate amused and intrigued. But I doubt even he would argue the book is worth THAT much.

At first I thought it was a joke – a graduate student with too much time on their hands. But there were TWO new copies for sale, each be offered for well over a million dollars. And the two sellers seemed not only legit, but fairly big time (over 8,000 and 125,000 ratings in the last year respectively). The prices looked random – suggesting they were set by a computer. But how did they get so out of whack?

When you’re building something that reacts to events in the cloud, you’re going to get some strange events. You’ll need to consider some alternative workflows, such as unreliable input and buggy software dependencies.

Because this example shows another “Never” happening.

(Link seen on Twitter.)

The name, address, and the approval number are all obviously dummy data. Should your system in production be outputting this? Of course not. But do you let the users–in this case, an installer or an administrator of the kiosk–just use the dummy data?

You see this trap sometimes when applications put the labels for controls as text in the controls themselves, such as an edit box that says “First Name” until you type into it. Sometimes, you’ll find the application will check to make sure the edit box is not empty, but the application is perfectly happy with “First Name” in it. The application is happy, but is the client happy that 50% of his registrations come from First Name Last Name of Address City State 55555? I think not. Don’t let them do it. Even if they’re trusted computer professionals.

Secondly, this is another reminder to check all your application’s outputs, QA. I know, that means sometimes getting up from the faintly warm glow of your monitor and the seat that has molded itself nicely to your backside, but if your application prints anything, you’d better make sure it looks good on paper (and on A4 paper if you’re pretending international use).