[JimDabell]

I saw plenty of similar things from outsourced teams.

For instance: An e-commerce API that used JSON. Not only did the spec. tell them to use integers with pence for prices, but it explicitly called out that it MUST NOT use floating points with pounds. Sure enough, they implemented it as floating point pounds. So we asked them to fix this.

The underlying datatype in the database was pounds in a decimal type. You would think that they would multiply this by 100 and call it a day. What they actually did was: a) render it as a string, b) strip the period character, and c) parse the resulting string as an integer. They didn’t test this properly before deploying, which resulted in us charging the correct price for things that cost £xxx.x5 but undercharging by a factor of ten for things that cost £xxx.x0 and undercharging by a factor of a hundred for things that cost £xxx.00.