The Great Post Office Scandal
Nick Wallis
This is an important book that I read well before the TV show was made as I knew at least some of the Fujitsu characters at lease peripherally and I was interested to know what the actual IT problems were.
Inevitably (and importantly) the book did focus on the human stories, although there was a comment near the beginning from a Fujitsu engineer about the bid-winning demonstrator being a cobbled-together prototype that was ill-advisably pushed into production, but this comment never seemed to be followed up anywhere.
The court cases and enquiry documents that are referenced from this did provide some of the technical detail that I was after, explaining some of the actual bugs, which were mostly, typically mundane things that we programmers create and try to deal with every working day, and were almost inevitable in such a massively complex system.
Examples I came across were things like failure to keep transactions “atomic” in the event of communication failures (leading to the re-issue of transaction ids); synchronisation errors for remote systems (both within branches and to the back-end systems); and perhaps most insidious of all, a bug within a third party transaction processing package - although this last might be considered a failure of testing and due diligence with suppliers.
Again, quite rightly all of this technical detail was waved over in the TV drama in order to concentrate on the appalling human cost and it was a shame on us all that it took the TV show to generate any sense of urgency towards justice.
Perhaps when the enquiries have concluded and recompense payments made there is another, somewhat shorter book to be written about what lessons we as IT folk can learn from this as well.