This is actually a step forward for Crapita
At least they are admitting they are ignoring our bug reports now. Saves me endlessly wondering if they are going to do anything about it.
Capita has told local councils up and down Britain that it will be closing all bug reports for its One Revenues and Benefits software suite which are more than 12 months old – even though these include flaws in the way student loans and housing benefits are calculated and paid. As a simple way of dealing with the unsexy side …
The software bugs are not permanently deleted. Clients will be able to view them on a shared platform and they can be re-opened at any time.
Presumably they mean that Jira access to the bug will remain and that the client will (for an extortionate fee) continue to have access to the project. Will the client be able to track progress of a bug that they re-open or will this go into an issue backlog and then be forgotten after another 12 months, which tends to be normal Capita behaviour?
"(Given the way some senior council staff misbehave, that might not be too far off the truth)"
Don't even get me started. I work in a local authority as well, and the madness I experience on a daily basis is frightening. What is equally, if not more frightening is the vitriol and character assassination which inevitably befalls anyone who questions the madness and suggests an alternative.
Again, anon. for obvious reasons!
It's similar in the States. At the Federal & State levels (especially big states) there's a level of professionalism that isn't perfect but resembles that of a half-way-decent corporation. At the county level it's like Grammar School, and the local town level is Lord Of The Flies.
This is shocking... </willy wonka>
...not that the public sector is rife with fuck ups and poor management...but that people who are minions won't stand up and call people out.
I know a lot of people that work for the public sector fear for their lives (it's probably last place people can work before being considered generally unemployable elsewhere), but come on...sometimes you have to call a c*nt a c*unt.
Trouble is there's no competition in the public sector, if you work for one council they're not worried you're going to jump ship or be poached (lol poaching public sector workers!) by another council.
Why do people work for the public sector? I can't think of anything worse to have on your CV.
You (a public sector intellectual): Ok 10 years is up, time to get a cushy CTO role...I'll send off my CV.
Meanwhile...
Interviewer: This one is interesting. 10 years experience, loads of certs...
Interviewer 2: Yeah it also says 5 years at a local authority as an underlying.
Interviewer: Ah my bad, only 5 years experience then.
Interviewer 2: Yeah...soooo....We'll put him in file 13...I don't like people that lie on their CV.
...let the carpet rot with everything underneath
So, it's:
1) Sweep small bugs under the rug;
2) Beat lump in rug flat;
3) ???
4) Profit!
Closing issue reports but permitting re-opening seems like a classic statistical performance play, hoping that customers won't bother because 12 months on, they'll have found work-arounds or given up on the busted function.
... the bug was just user-error in the first place.
But user error issues would have been closed already as "Invalid" or "Training/documentation".
Or it was fixed when fixing something else.
If things get fixed when fixing something else, vendor testers should pick that up from the dev team's change notices and the response to customers should be "Fixed - retest".
Otherwise you're basically saying the customers are the only real test group, and given the resource constraints while they're also juggling the work-arounds, manual steps and odd spreadsheets to handle the known issues and the missing stuff that's coming in Phase 2*, they're just not going to spontaneously re-test something unless prompted.
*Sadly, that phase never comes.
If I had cases with them I'd mass re-open them as soon as. Not even re-open but reword it and send new with different wording to throw off any automation they have that will de-prioritise re-opened cases. Looks like they're hoping to clear all that and hope people forgot what cases they had with them to appear like they've improved their ratios.
"The software bugs are not permanently deleted. Clients will be able to view them on a shared platform and they can be re-opened at any time."
Which totally and fully resolves the issues how, if the overall intention is to not fix them anyway?
Presumably this is all done to meet some badly negotiated SLA or KPI.
And there you have the problem.
Supplier A, shit beyond all imagining, but system in place, mostly works, costs £x per year
Supplier B, could be OK, but they deal with local government, so probably not, costs also £x per year, but also retraining costs and unknown downtime during switch-over.
It always seems to be a case of better the devil you know when it comes to MIS and ERP software...
I wonder how long it will be before those who placed the contract with them will be referring to it about their SLA for resolving bugs.
Would be interesting to see what happens when someone raises a duplicate of one of those bugs, will they simply refer back to the old bug and perpetuate the problem ?.
This is dangerous ground simply saying "wont' fix" since it mixes them up with other things that someone actually looked at. Perhaps they should have updated the status to something like "Couldn't be bothered to look at" or "SLA manipulation" or similar.
This is not going to win them any positive views from any current or potential customer.
I wonder who pays for any that result in poor calculations and the end customer looses money for example.
I'm sure Crapita will have the contract locked down tight to indemnify them against any and all ineptitude / incompetence / calculation errors. If there's one thing management likes to cover it's their own collective arse.
Also remember, the end customer is not the poor benefits claimant who get's fucked over, it's the local authority, who usually give even less of a shit about benefits claimants than Crapita. Trust me, almost no one in local authority will care about this because they aren't the one's getting shafted when something goes wrong. Maybe the odd person with some actual integrity, but they'll be shouting at deaf ears.
Sure, Crapita are just that, as crap as it gets but this is simply the thin end of the wedge in the endless quest for "agile". In otherwords producing systems that are barely fit for purprose but it must be really good because we (almost) delivered some of it on time. As a bonus some bit work as well.
Any hint of justified criticism and you are deemed to be negative and undermining the project. And all this is this result of funky management consultants being paid huge sums of money to dream up the next new way of working.