4.2.09

Southern Railway broken payment processing workflow

04-02-2009 18-55-54

Just how bad does it get? It seems the failure of the train system is really systemic. How could this happen on a live site that takes payments? It does not fill me with a lot of confidence; I guess the passwords are probably stored in clear text in the database.

This little episode transpired whilst I was trying to purchase a season ticket(annual train ticket). It happened right at the end of the workflow. The culprit: a missing include file; does this stuff ever get tested. Just because it works in the dev environment does not guarantee that it will work in the live.  You would have thought that the deployment process, plus configuration management and the army of QA testers would have caught this, but it seems they never made it into the office due to the snowy conditions. Sigh.

Automated unit and functional tests would most probably have created visibility of this issue.

1 comment:

Taiwanigloo said...

Hate the train services. They charge more and more and more but delivery terrible services.

Good luck with ur purchursing