How Incompetence and Bad Testing ruined 700+ lives
Coding Nightmares, Part 2
Due to the popularity of my previous article, The Worst Time-Based Coding Mistakes in History, I am posting about another instance of faulty code ruining lives.
This is one of the most devastating and current nightmares that has plagued the world. Though, unlike the other ones, this is more due to incompetence amongst people who do not understand the technology, than the actual coders themselves.
Basically, the British Post used a piece of software called Horizon in order to keep track of their finances. This was used for the automated salary payments, benefits, and general accounting for the system. However, the system was fraught with bugs, including the Dalmellington and Callendar Square Bug. The former was an intermittent bug (meaning it was not always reproducible) which occurred when a user repeatedly clicked a key when the system froze as she was trying to acknowledge a transaction of £8k into her account. Each repeated click gave her another £8k, leading to a discrepancy of £24k in the user’s account. The Callendar Square bug, similarly, generated duplicate transactions for which the user was held responsible.
An investigation revealed a total of 22 bugs, 21 of which had caused financial loss. Many of these bugs made it seem like customers and…
