> I wonder if the Fujitsi developers, far removed from the Post Office staff, have ever stopped to consider that the software they wrote ruined the lives of so many people.
They may not even be aware that they worked on this. Or they may have relayed concerns about schedule pressure making errors inevitable, or may be working in an environment where no such concerns can ever be raised.
It seems likely that they're working in the before-testing times which correlates strongly with risk of the above.
I wonder about the procurement process that lead to Fujitsu supplying the UK post office. This might be an instance of the public sector picking the cheapest from N bids then looking surprised when cheapest turns out to mean crap.
All you say are plausible scenarios. But there is also another one: the developers were simply not very good at writing code - neither diligent, thorough, or aware of good practices. Or they simply didn't care about the bugs or errors even if they knew about them. They never had to suffer the consequences.
The developers in question probably don't even work for Fujitsu. They probably work outside the UK, in the software equivalent of a sweatshop, and spend most of their time copy-pasting from Stack Overflow and writing the kind of incoherent GitHub issue comments that every maintainer of a high-profile OSS project has to deal with these days. They provide the single-digit-dollars-per-hour code output, and Fujitsu makes sure the requirements are vague enough that they can meet them with the resulting dumpster fire, and this is the result.
They may not even be aware that they worked on this. Or they may have relayed concerns about schedule pressure making errors inevitable, or may be working in an environment where no such concerns can ever be raised.
It seems likely that they're working in the before-testing times which correlates strongly with risk of the above.
I wonder about the procurement process that lead to Fujitsu supplying the UK post office. This might be an instance of the public sector picking the cheapest from N bids then looking surprised when cheapest turns out to mean crap.