All software is like that. Whenever your software is going to go from development into suddenly being rolled out nationally to being installed in well over 10,000 post offices nationally, you’re going to have glitches and people using it in unintended ways. This happens with almost every game release. It is released from the studio and suddenly bugs specific to different hardware which the developers couldn’t really have foresaw.
I know someone who worked for a company who’s software suddenly had charged someone 3x the amount that they should have been because they did something hacky with the product. (Thankfully by “charged”, it was just a generated invoice, so nobody needed to actually go about refunding).
What happened in this situation is what should have happened with the post office. The customer contacts the software company’s client, who contacted the company, who diagnosed and fixed the issue. Instead the post office hailed the software as some form of infallible deity instead of it being a simple glitch and decided to prosecute the subpostmasters.
Maybe there’s some nuance I’m missing here, I have seen the Channel 4 drama and listened to some Radio 4 podcasts on it, so there is a chance that Fujitsu encouraged them to hail their software as something which wasn’t prone to glitches or whatever. But in my opinion from what I know, the problem wasn’t necessarily the software or Fujitsu, it was the Post Office for prosecuting subpostmasters instead of reporting a glitch to Fujitsu, which if they did the latter it might have made a minor news headline before being consigned to history.
A Fujitsu programmer from the time, Richard Roll, who would become a key witness in the sub-postmasters’ high court case against the Post Office in 2019, told the Eye that Horizon was one the company’s few profitable contracts […] “We would have been fined,” said Roll, who worked at the company between 2001 and 2004. “So the incentive was to pretend it [software error] didn’t happen”, while running “a constant rolling programme of patches to fix the bugs”. Fujitsu “would basically tell the Post Office what they wanted to hear”
It was the Post Office that lied about it but the software Fujitsu developed was still shit.
All software is like that. Whenever your software is going to go from development into suddenly being rolled out nationally to being installed in well over 10,000 post offices nationally, you’re going to have glitches and people using it in unintended ways. This happens with almost every game release. It is released from the studio and suddenly bugs specific to different hardware which the developers couldn’t really have foresaw.
I know someone who worked for a company who’s software suddenly had charged someone 3x the amount that they should have been because they did something hacky with the product. (Thankfully by “charged”, it was just a generated invoice, so nobody needed to actually go about refunding).
What happened in this situation is what should have happened with the post office. The customer contacts the software company’s client, who contacted the company, who diagnosed and fixed the issue. Instead the post office hailed the software as some form of infallible deity instead of it being a simple glitch and decided to prosecute the subpostmasters.
Maybe there’s some nuance I’m missing here, I have seen the Channel 4 drama and listened to some Radio 4 podcasts on it, so there is a chance that Fujitsu encouraged them to hail their software as something which wasn’t prone to glitches or whatever. But in my opinion from what I know, the problem wasn’t necessarily the software or Fujitsu, it was the Post Office for prosecuting subpostmasters instead of reporting a glitch to Fujitsu, which if they did the latter it might have made a minor news headline before being consigned to history.
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-in-the-post
Why would they have been fined over a simple bug?