RBS 'Computer Glitch'

[Mich the Tester]

NatWest glitch: Computer system that caused chaos for thousands was being supervised from India | Mail Online

Bank boss 'must pay price' for accounts shambles: RBS chief faces calls to forfeit another bonus as crisis is linked to IT team in India | Mail Online

Yep, trouble is they've seen the job ad in Hyderabad and concluded it must be an Indian screw up; I think it's likely, but I'm not happy to trust the Daily Wail on this.

[Mich the Tester]

At the end of the day it's the failure of the testers for not picking it up. Head tester was probably posting bollocks all day on the Internet and looking at images of beautiful women.

My long lost twin brother?

Or was it TestMangler?

[TimberWolf]

At the end of the day it's the failure of the testers for not picking it up. Head tester was probably posting bollocks all day on the Internet and looking at images of beautiful women.

And the Head Tester is ... Hester. You couldn't make it up. Unless you did of course.

[MarillionFan]

Yep, trouble is they've seen the job ad in Hyderabad and concluded it must be an Indian screw up; I think it's likely, but I'm not happy to trust the Daily Wail on this.

The Daily Mail could have got their story from here?

I had heard that in fact it had been caused by a senior IT contractor who was in charge of testing. He'd been watching Spartacus on his laptop and hadn't seen a gremlin on the wing of the code release ripping out chunks of code.

[TimberWolf]

Yep, trouble is they've seen the job ad in Hyderabad and concluded it must be an Indian screw up; I think it's likely, but I'm not happy to trust the Daily Wail on this.

I'm not happy to trust Hester on this either.

[darmstadt]

Reading between the lines it seems that someone has not followed procedures for the overnight batch run. CA7, which I've used for many years on and off (was previously UCC-7), is a batch scheduling systems which means that when a job finishes, and finishes with a return code that is acceptable, then the next batch job is started (this is just a simple scenario.) What seems to have happened is they have made some changes to their scheduling system and the rules put in place have been either overridden manually or the 'fix' made a change to the rules in place. This means that it was either not tested properly (all systems of this type have a test system place for this eventuality and if not then the company is incompetent) or someone manually overrode the procedures. Now if this area has been outsourced then that is a crime as the area that normally operates this product has to have a very close relationship with _all_ departments involved in IT and is normally found sitting next to the computer systems in question (put it this way, every company I have worked at in the last 30 years does it that way and this has never happened.) So basically they ****ed up but they could have called me in for a decent rate....

[Mich the Tester]

Reading between the lines it seems that someone has not followed procedures for the overnight batch run. CA7, which I've used for many years on and off (was previously UCC-7), is a batch scheduling systems which means that when a job finishes, and finishes with a return code that is acceptable, then the next batch job is started (this is just a simple scenario.) What seems to have happened is they have made some changes to their scheduling system and the rules put in place have been either overridden manually or the 'fix' made a change to the rules in place. This means that it was either not tested properly (all systems of this type have a test system place for this eventuality and if not then the company is incompetent) or someone manually overrode the procedures. Now if this area has been outsourced then that is a crime as the area that normally operates this product has to have a very close relationship with _all_ departments involved in IT and is normally found sitting next to the computer systems in question (put it this way, every company I have worked at in the last 30 years does it that way and this has never happened.) So basically they ****ed up but they could have called me in for a decent rate....

They could have got a decent tester for a decent rate, but banks don't pay decent rates for testers. If they want good testers they should be paying a risk premium for them; who wants a tester with 'CA7 Testing at RBS' on his CV now?

[EternalOptimist]

Blame pointed at a failed CA-7 update

send their profile to KrashMeLive ???

ho ho

[Bumfluff]

Don't know how true this is but found this on 'The Money' website, mentions it believes files were deleted in error 3 nights on the trot ....

RBS says outsourcing of IT work to India nothing to do with computer system chaos | This is Money

[eek]

Don't know how true this is but found this on 'The Money' website, mentions it believes files were deleted in error 3 nights on the trot ....

RBS says outsourcing of IT work to India nothing to do with computer system chaos | This is Money

that's a republished version of the Faily Wail article above.