What was the root cause of the Post Office scandal in the UK? Are the software developers who built the Horizon IT System to blame? And if not, at what point if any do software developers have a professional duty of care for the systems that they build?

Is it enough for Fujitsu who built the system to claim to be "sorry" while making billions in government contracts and producing software that couldn't achieve its basic goals of keeping the accounts?

Big Distributed software systems are genuinely complex things, we are always close to complexity and so prone to mistakes, but the commercials of software development often mean that projects like these are complex at the social and commercial level too. The Post Office Scandal has exposed all of these issues and innocent people have paid the cost over two decades.

At its roots though this was the result of technical failures of some software, so in this episode, software engineer, author and software thought leader, Dave Farley dissects the more technical parts of this story. Why and how did this software fail and what questions should we be asking? beyond questions about the reasons behind the scandalous blaming of innocent people for software failures that were known not to be their fault.

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🖇 LINKS:
🔗 "Horizon System Overview" ➡️ https://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/SVC...

🔗 "Horizon System Audit Manual - Technical Outline ➡️ https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry....

🔗 "How the Post Office’s Horizon IT system failed" ➡️ https://inews.co.uk/news/how-post-off...

🔗 "ACID Transactions" ➡️ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID

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📖 The original, award-winning "Continuous Delivery" book by Dave Farley and Jez Humble ➡️ https://amzn.to/2WxRYmx

📖 "Continuous Delivery Pipelines" by Dave Farley
Paperback ➡️ https://amzn.to/3gIULlA
ebook version ➡️ https://leanpub.com/cd-pipelines

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#softwareengineer #developer #postoffice #horizon