One piece of news that has emerged recently is that Post Office is unable to proceed with compensation for about 1000 cases because they cannot find any evidence that Horizon was at fault. Another case is that one former postmaster is in prison for murdering his wife and part of the evidence for that is that he suffered from shortfalls in his Horizon system. How can it be that we are so many years into the Inquiry and contributory court cases and there is still discussion as to whether a postmaster is experiencing bugs errors and defects!
One of the most frustrating points about out listening to the Inquiry is that witnesses and lawyers have such a feeble grasp of how software bugs are created distributed and fixed. It may be this is deliberate in some way as at one point people wanted to deny that bugs even exist. Even going so far as to name them using some innocent expression in the hope that nobody would notice.
Well let’s be honest, every non-trivial piece of software that was ever developed has bugs. It may be they are covered in well worn paths and so are not obvious but they are always there just waiting for someone to go down that wrong path. Even if your team has developed the first bug free piece of code you can rest assured that the Operating system or dependent product does not.
So how does the software business work at all? One way is to insist that all software is used at your own risk, i.e. they simply deny bugs exist or the only remedy they offer is that they will attempt to fix any reported problems. You may have to have a “support contract” in order to report bugs in any software you have. You will only be able to do this if you have “supported versions” of associated software (e.g. operating systems). For customers like Post Office who have “estates” of computers coming to their end of life it may be that systems have gone out of contract. This is a question that needs to be asked and answered for Post Office but nobody has at the Inquiry.
Software needs to be distributed, not just your application but all the base applications and operating systems. For a large estate this can be expensive and difficult. Nevertheless the process has to be documented, tested and rolled out. The Inquiry never asked how this was done and the parties (Fujitsu and Post office) never stated how they did it.
Once the systems are up and running problems can be experienced by users. They should be able to report those problems, get them investigated and receive a fix. How should they get fix? That was never asked or discussed at the Inquiry. Did individuals get a fix? Were fixes collected and rolled out to all post offices? Did someone have to visit and do that or was it automatically rolled out ? (as pretty much everybody does now).
Users should get a report on each problem they report. The Inquiry heard a lot from Fujitsu Support and they seemed to be a very professional outfit. Not many other companies are that organised. When they report a problem that is already known they should receive a description via a KEL. The KEL is now well known to all who have studied the Horizon system. They are an excellent idea and prevent duplicated work. What they are NOT though is a repository for all problems, at least in this author’s humble opinion. The Inquiry and indeed contributing Lawyers for the appeal cases tried to present them as though they were such. How can we know – simple just ask someone at Fujitsu! The inquiry did just this but this author felt the Inquiry used leading questions.
Problems should then be passed to development for investigation, resolution and correction. Each problem should be documented in the relevant Problem Management Database. Note this is not any support database. The developers should decide whether this is a one off problem that needs a one-off fix or to be rushed out in a release for all postmasters.
We do know that Fujitsu used named releases, they were mentioned in evidence. However what ere the rules governed when a release was made? How much documentation was made for each problem resolved? None of that release documentation was made available to the Inquiry.