Comments by "TheEvertw" (@TheEvertw) on "Developers Blamed For The Post Office Horizon Scandal?" video.

  1. The behaviour of Fujitsu is shocking. And as they could have predicted, this has now come out, and will cost them in the order of a billion pounds in damages. I never understand how some people will protect their own image & ego in the short term, while ensuring its destruction in the long term. The managers that made the choice to keep this bug under the rug may well face criminal prosecution.
    63
  2. While software developers have a professional duty to do their best, I feel the main responsibility lies with their principal. This team did not have the skills & knowledge to build this system. Otherwise it would have instituted processes, tests and mechanisms to ensure ACID behaviour. But I don't think you can blame people for something they did not know. The final responsibility is with the principal who trusted them, not the developers. Fujitsu is not a small company and has a LOT of experience with critical systems. In a normal situation, in a healthy company, the pattern of faulty transactions would have been picked up quite quickly, remedied and its victims compensated. There must have been logs from which the behaviour of the system could have been reconstructed, and the culprit identified. The Post Office didn't do its due dilligence in find the root cause of the problem, but instead assumed the office managers were at fault. Without proof. And it is a dire indictment against the UK legal system, that they followed the Post Office in its findings, without demanding proper proof that the SW system was not at fault. Courts must be aware that SW can be at fault.
    29
  3.  @0LoneTech  "accepting absolutely no responsibility" The software industry is perfectly willing to accept responsibility -- except that almost no-one is willing to pay us sufficiently for us to take responsibility. So, in order to save money, we are forced to cut corners. Writing software is the most complex activity humanity is capable of. We can do a lot for a price that is acceptable. But the costs for doing a perfect job are tenfold (if not more) of doing a "mostly OK" job. Ask the medical and military industries.
    7
  4. @@retiredbore378 Thanks for the insult, dude. I'm an MSc (EE) with 30 years experience developing firmware.
    3
  5. Software development is a GIGO process. Garbage In, Garbage Out.
    3
  6. After some thought, my bet is that the development of this software was scaled up prematurely by managers wanting to make a deadline. I.e. before the problem was thoroughly analyzed and an architecture defined that could deliver the reliability demands required. What tips me off is the bitching about the "useless" developers. It shows that the architect / lead designer of the software did not have the project planned & designed to a point where less capable developers can work without doing damage. Those developers probably drained his time & energy so he never got round to tackling the hard problems in this project. I have seen it happen in other projects. Projects with a lot of technical risk (like this one) need to be started with a core team of high-quality developers who focus on the hard problems and tackle them. Only after the technical risk is acceptably low can less capable developers be shoe-horned into a project.
    2