Deutsche Bank / unstable interfaces

Deutsche Bank is a large, international bank. They offer services world-wide and are undoubtedly proud of their massive corporate IT department.

Yet, at the same time, they fail to get the most fundamental principles of user/customer-visible interfaces wrong: Don't change them. If you need to change them, manage the change carefully.

In many software projects, keeping the API or other interface stable is paramount. Think of the Linux kernel, where breaking a userspace-visible interface is not permitted. The reasons are simple: If you break that interface, _everyone_ using that interface will need to change their implementation, and will have to synchronize that with the change on the other side of the interface.

The internet online banking system of Deutsche Bank in Germany permits the upload of transactions by their customers in a CSV file format.

And guess what? They change the file format from one day to the other.

  • without informing their users in advance, giving them time to adopt their implementations of that interface

  • without documenting the exact nature of the change

  • adding new fields to the CSV in the middle of the line, rather than at the end of the line, to make sure things break even more

Now if you're running a business and depend on automatizing your payments using the interface provided by Deutsche Bank, this means that you fail to pay your suppliers in time, you hastily drop/delay other (paid!) work that you have to do in order to try to figure out what exactly Deutsche Bank decided to change completely unannounced, from one day to the other.

If at all, I would have expected this from a hobbyist kind of project. But seriously, from one of the worlds' leading banks? An interface that is probably used by thousands and thousands of users? WTF?!?