Context

At the time of this blog post my family and me are on holiday in Iceland. Since we are not that often in Iceland we, amongst visiting relatives and friends, use the time to look into administrative and regulatory stuff that is easier to do in Iceland than from abroad.

Syslumen

One of the things necessary is to renew my wifes passport. For which you actually need to physically go to the Civil Registry, or in icelandic ´Syslumen´. The process of renewal is (boringly) straightforward. At the office you get a number, wait, identify yourself and pay for your renewal, get a form, wait, identify yourself again, hand over the form and update your data (including new digital photo and fingerprint), sign and wait for a couple of weeks to pick up your passport at the Civil Registry.

Except

Since we´re only on holiday in Iceland a couple of weeks of waiting is not a real option. So to amend this my wife investigated and proposed the solution to sent the new passport to the consulate in our country. An option, once validated by the team lead, that was acceptable to the civil clerk. And thus the proper check box was looked for and found.

Into the process

After filling in the personal details instead of the offices address the address of the consulate was needed. The page itself did not offer any listing. The help page wasn´t really helpful either as it only pointed towards a government listing at another department. After some searching the consulate in Amsterdam and its address was found and the data could be entered. So everything was entered and the OK could be clicked. Nothing happened. Looking over the page the clerk found:

Færðu inn lögboðnar reit (Please enter mandatory data) next to a field asking for Póstnúmer (Zip code) that had been left empty as it had also been empty on the government listing. So what to do? My wife and the clerks colleague suggested to google it. And so she did. The zip code was entered and again the OK was clicked. The intranet page jumped back to the entry page and everything looked okay. But the clerk rightfully noted that the usual confirmation message was not shown and checked my wifes file. To her, and my wifes surprise no data was added, meaning the whole 20 minute worth of data was absent.

The process repeated itself a few times and eventually another colleague noted that the zip code contained letters. Something not used in Iceland itself. Why not leave those out of the field and move them somewhere else, say in front of Amsterdam. Now when clicking OK the confirmation appeared and a check showed that the file now contained all the data.

YAGNI

Even with only a couple of thousand Icelanders living abroad chances that they live in one of the eight countries (e.g. Canada, Great-Britain) using alpha numeric characters is realistic especially since many more countries use the country abbreviation in front of their zip code. So when my wife returned to tell about her plight she commented: Clearly neither the developer nor tester thought this field was important. But it really bugged me today. Further more she noted The same software company maintained the government listing and had all the zip codes removed, leaving empty spaces in the listing. That´s even more stupid.

Clearly someone must have convinced the developers and testers “You Ain´t Gonna Need It” (YAGNI).