MNLARS Program Executives Highlight Remedial Action

The Legislative Auditor’s Office released a report Thursday, February 14, examining the factors that contributed to the problems with the Minnesota Licensing and Registration System. The report concluded that both the Department of Public Safety and Minnesota Information Technology Services, or MN.IT, must share the blame for the problems. It further concluded that the nine year, $100 million dollar investment should have been sufficient and that many factors contributed to the problems with the system.

Newly-appointed Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington and Acting MN.IT Director Bill Poirier appear before the Legislative Audit Commission February 14 to offer their views on action needed to improve the system.

[valentinarichard]

I live in the state of Minnesota, I went to have my driver's license renewed in April the actual license was not delivered in the mail until July, I asked myself why.

I also have many many years of experience working in IT, it seems to me that they didn't follow the basic procedures that are always applicable to a clean project. After the code was written:

Technical walk-thrus gather stake holders of the project (Business and Technical) to manually talk through the newly written code. Making sure that what was coded is what they want.

Unit testing, making sure your code works.

System testing, insures that the system with new code included is working correctly.

Regression testing, making sure that new code hasn't broken existing code.

Performance testing, making sure that the bulk data (I've tested systems with hundreds and millions of recods) with new code, can be processed with no problem or system slow down.

The procedures listed above should be applicable to every project whether the project is being performed in MN or any other state or territory if these things are done a lot of errors will be caught prior to a production roll out.