Totally crap software

This is a possibly futile attempt to get off the subject of politics in the middle of a general election campaign and have a damn good rant about something that really winds me up - software that is totally crap and useless!

Now listen - in a former life I spent a quarter of a century making sure that IT projects performed properly. Some of this stuff I'm not even allowed to talk about in case the New Labour Thought Police come knocking on my door. Anyway, let's at least assume I might know what I am talking about....

This is how it works :

* Someone thinks they need a program written to do something, so they form a project team

* We sit down and make out a project plan. This goes something along the lines of -

• We know what day it is and we know when we want to start selling it, so the difference is the length of the project
• Item 2, write a specification. But hang on, how do we know how long the project is going to take if we haven't got a spec yet? Shouldn't we do this first?
• Third, decide how long a nominal, set team of programmers will take write the software to the spec we haven't written yet
• Now we know when the date when programme will be ready for testing, so the time taken is the difference between then and the launch date

* The program goes on sale and doesn't work properly.

This is because there was a bottleneck in the testing department not because the programme was delivered late and was written by a team of deaf blind monkeys somewhere in India, under pressure to get it done quickly with too few resources, in an unrealistic time scale to an ever changing spec! And, of course, on a fixed price contract...

In the exciting world of Government (bugger - I'm back to politics!), this is complicated by the fact they outsource the job to firms of consultants who hire in contractors because anyone with the skills and competence necessary to do the job most likely works for themselves.

Also, there is absolutely no incentive to get it right. Many firms I have worked for are not interested in doing it right because when the thing doesn't do what it's supposed to, they can charge their clients for fixing it. This is akin to paying fifty grand for a car which breaks down as you drive it out of the garage - and then being charged to get it going again. Unbelievable, but true!

And I'm not going to argue with this, because one of the main Government outsource companies for IT is owned by the same people who put a horse's head in your bed - so I'm sure as hell not going to name them here. We both know who you are...

So next time you are queuing round the block for a passport, trying to find your bags in terminal five or wondering where the hell your student loan has got to, remember - you heard it here first!

(And all this because the bloudy people who monitor the hits on this site kept telling me I had no readers - but you and I know better, don't we?)