From Tony Green
Timothy Revell reports on efforts to develop software that can tolerate bugs (5 December, p 40). A major cause of buggy software is the attitude of some programmers and, rather more significantly, their managers.
In the 1980s, I was a utility programmer, producing software to automate much of our team’s work. Before allowing it to go live, I would always hand my code over to Pete. Pete had the most amazing talent for doing what no programmer would ever imagine anybody would do with a program; once my software was Pete-proof I could be confident it was going to work well.
By contrast, in the 1990s my job was to test a business-critical, complex and very unstable suite of code. Whenever I flagged up serious bugs that should have been showstoppers, I came under pressure to sign the release off so it could go live on its target date.
I made myself very unpopular by refusing to comply – especially among senior managers, who no doubt had bonuses riding on the schedule. I was shuffled off to another role so someone more compliant could take over.
Ipswich, Suffolk, UK
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