The Pragmatic Programmer is one of the best books available concerning the development of quality software. It is structured as a series of tips, with illustrative examples and the occasional horror story. One of the first tips is the DRY principle:
DRY - Don't Repeat Yourself
Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.
DRY is often misinterpreted to mean simply that code should not be duplicated, but it is somewhat more subtle: don't duplicate state. If you have multiple different places in the code which keep state about an aspect of the system, and all places have to have the same content at all times for the system to work properly, then you have made maintenance of the system harder than it needs to be. You'll have to debug cases where the representations fall out of sync, and all such places must be updated at the same time when code changes are made. The Pragmatic Programmers extend the DRY principle outside of the code itself to include database schemes, documentation, and build systems. Everything should have one authoritative source.
This brings us to the Department of Motor Vehicles, though the Gentle Reader might at first not see the connection. I received a form in the mail to renew my driver's license, which I promptly signed and sent back. The new license arrived in due course, and things were fine until a few weeks later when I noticed the address was incorrect. The old license is correct, the new one is wrong.
I've no idea whether the address was correct on the renewal form, I did not check it. Apparently I should have, but I didn't bother - it hadn't changed. At some stage of the renewal process, a single digit was altered in a subtle way.
Why was it even possible for the address to be changed in the renewal process? Here we can only speculate. The DMV does need a procedure to update an address as part of a license renewal, because sometimes people supply a new one on the form. I'll speculate that the DMV, either via OCR or manual typing, re-enters the address in all cases and not just if the form supplied a change. This procedure depends on the original address to be faithfully reproduced in cases where it wasn't supposed to change. In my case, either due to OCR glitch or typing error, a digit changed resulting in the new license being printed with an incorrect address.
I believe this is an example of the consequences of a violation of the DRY principle. The same state - my address - exists in two places: in the DMV database and on the form. Those two pieces of state are supposed to be the same, indeed must be the same for the process to work correctly, but errors can easily occur which allow their contents to get out of sync.
A corollary lesson in this situation: if state isn't supposed to change, don't change it. If the form does not indicate a change of address, the authoritative state is in the database and the form contents should be ignored.
Aftereffects
I've already received a jury summons at the incorrect address, which the post office helpfully delivered to me anyway. Even after correcting the address I suspect I will receive a summons twice as often from now on. That will form the basis of a future blog post to illustrate the importance of duplicate suppression in databases, I suppose.
I can change my address back by submitting a form to the DMV, but issuing a new license with the correct address will be at my own cost. This is part of the price of modern life, I suppose.