Taking Testing Seriously

CHAPTER 16Lessons of the Post Office Horizon Scandal

—by James Christie

Top managers are rarely interested in the details of the software that runs their businesses. They just want it to work. They want to assume that it does work. This is understandable, and it may even be reasonable. But in some companies, that positive thinking bias can turn into a pugnacious, bullying insistence. It can become willful negligence—or something even worse than that.

This is what happened at Fujitsu and the UK Post Office, starting in 1999, when they forced postal workers to use an utterly unreliable accounting system called Horizon. Over 20 years, hundreds of these postal workers’ lives were devastated by people in power who blamed the users instead of the software.

This is a dramatic story, of course—it has literally been dramatized on British television—and at the time of this writing, a criminal investigation is finally underway. But what does it have to do with testing? After all, bad testing is a small part of the Horizon scandal. For the most part, middle management knew their product didn't work and covered it up. Better testing may not have helped them.

Here's why it should matter to you: As testers, it's our job to give bad news. If the conditions in the project are making it impossible for us to do our jobs to a reasonable standard, we have a duty to say so. This is a difficult and sensitive process.

Rapid Software Testing methodology is a way of working that presumes our clients ...