Looking over the horizon...

The Post Office/Fujitsu Horizon debacle commentary has rightly focused on the corporate level shenanigans and the resulting human misery; however I think there are important implications for professional software engineers.

We have to acknowledge that the Horizon solution demonstrates that poor design decisions and implementation have real-world implications. I did not work on the Horizon solution (I am not sure anyone would now say they did) but Tip 98 from The Pragmatic Programmer

“First, Do No Harm”

has never seemed more applicable. Perhaps if the developers had followed Tip 97

“Sign Your Work”

they would have been less willing to say the code was done, and does what was expected. Or Tip 70

Test your software, or your users will.

A healthy dose of scepticism from the business might have helped them ask more challenging questions about the solution (why are cases going up? could something else be causing the discrepancies?), but technology can appear beyond simple explanation.

The strong leaders I have worked with in the past have been confident to say they need it to be explained again, which has challenged me to explain the solution/problem/etc in a way that is understandable to people outside of technology.