Buggy CBA NetBank Term Deposit Management facility

In the CBA Internet Banking Service, one could supposedly manage one's term deposit investment online. However, the following two examples show the bugs in this program making such a simple task impossible and downright frustrating. Not only that, the design of it is so confusing.

One would expect the largest bank in Australia would not commit this kind simple programmatic mistakes. Before making accusation, the NetBank optimisation check facility was used to ascertain that my operating environment meeting the specification and here is the result:

Please note the facility is not sensitive to operating system and all versions of the operating system contains the latest updates.


1) Select a New Term Deposit option.
The facility displays a list of term deposit option as shown here:

Looks good but on the above mentioned environment it does not allow the user to click on any radio button to select the prefer option unless I am using IE8 & 10. This part also fails in IE11 like Firefox. To ensure no Firefox add-in was causing the problem, the Firefox was re-run in safe mode and it produced the same result. I have also test them using Firefox in Win7 and producing the same result.

Hence this part of the web page appears to be very sensitive to the browser version and type or one could not trust the verification service of NetBank.

2) This is the best one I have seen that even a primary school kid knowing real number comparison could see the folly.

In a section available for entering maturity instructions - which do not appear to apply for the imminent renewal but from all the descriptions, this section appears to be apply at the maturity of the imminent renewal. That confusing part (prime candidate for "Why Software Sucks") is not relevant to the current issue.

In that section there is a field where you can specify "Additional investment amount" and next to the field is a maximum figure of $1,897,643.83, which I can guarantee anyone that I do not have. Please note this figure.

When you enter a value of 0.5, representing 50 cents, the entry validation control raises an error like this:

The error message is:

Since when is 0.5 NOT "less than or equal to the maximum amount ($1,897,643.83) shown"?

I believe what happens under the hood is the application of "Everything is a Nail" anti-pattern looking like this:

    if ( !ValidateInput(amount) )
         ErrMsg = "Please enter an amount less than or equal to the maximum amount shown";

As long as ValidateInput() returning false, the same error message is used, irrespective if it is appropriate. In the ValidateInput() $0.5 is probably not a valid entry - being below the minimum of $1.00, I guess. The developer probably expects the user to possess psychic power that can see the rule table residing on the CBA Server.

If you have previously defined an additional investment amount and wanting to remove it. In IE10, you can delete it but it then raises another error like this:

In Firefox, when one tries to delete the entry, the program raises the above mentioned error message. In IE10, you could ignore that protestation and the submit button allows the user to commit the changes even when it says the field is required but with no data. Is it a required field or is it not?

Now you see this buggy program creates more frustration and raise the blood pressure higher.