Developers should not do their own testing
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From todays paper: FORT WORTH - Early on Election Day, Rick O'Neal was sent to fix a voting machine that wouldn't accept ballots at a south Fort Worth church. What he found threw the Tarrant County elections into turmoil for nearly 30 hours. Trying to fix the balloting problem, O'Neal discovered a far more serious glitch -- that voting machines were not crediting individual candidates with straight-party-ticket votes. "I was stunned," said O'Neal, who works in the county's information technology division. "I wasn't expecting to see that at all." County Elections Administrator Robert Parten said a programming error and ineffective pre-election testing was at fault -- and said he would take the blame. "I know the programming error was an honest mistake by a competent person," Parten said. "I'm the responsible person in charge when something happens." Parten said the voting system had been checked repeatedly in the past month for accuracy, but that faulty testing methodology caused officials to overlook the problem. Now what testing did they really do, if only the developer and the dept lead look at it? Go get a sample of people off of the street.