Wednesday, May 14, 2008

RHB Internet Banking Programmers

There are sentiments that local programmers sucks. Sometimes its unavoidable that such
biased sentiments are expressed towards local talents and here is one such example.

I found out lately that i could not login to http://www.rhbbank.com.my/ to do my online banking, that means i have to queue up to pay for utilities and astro..(hehe)

The reason i could not login is diplayed on the page :

The following error has occurred.Result Code: 1
Result Message: *ERR-onlynum

This message implies 2 things :-

i. the programmers working on this project has implemented a check routine that
detects if your password is all "numbers" and to discourage you to continue using such "unsafe" practices it blatantly displays this message.

They even display on the login page that you should login to change ur password to alphanumeric for security reasons....but what they forgot was....

ii. the programmers working on this project was dumb enought to FORGET to test this system on users that have such passwords and the system did not allow the user to even login to change the password. So if you cannot LOGIN to the system, how in the world do they expect you to change ur password? This kind of logic i thought was something i witness during the first 2 years of my junior programming projects , but to see it happening on a PUBLIC website for a BANK is just unbelievable.

After a number of calls to the customer service, they said they need a WEEK to solve this problem on their IT dept. One wonders if a 5 minutes solution requires ONE week to solve and the very fact that they did not test the system for such cheap bugs is amazing.

If i was the Project director, i would have fired the team responsible and hired a whole bunch of new programmers , the chances of a team working on a Bank website to have such error is like hitting a lottery.