back to article Capita lights One Revenues and Benefits bug bonfire: ALL reports older than 12 months to be ignored

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 …

  1. Rameses Niblick the Third Kerplunk Kerplunk Whoops Where's My Thribble?

    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.

    1. ArrZarr Silver badge
      WTF?

      Re: This is actually a step forward for Crapita

      Just imagine how much easier your life would be if you could say "Yeah, that's a tricky one. I can't be arsed to fix it".

      You'd have all the time in the world once you got fired for being crap at your job.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: This is actually a step forward for Crapita

        It's almost the ideal help desk role. To make it truly inline with the public sector though they really should attach a bonus to deleting tickets.

  2. macjules
    Unhappy

    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?

  3. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "we are saying they will not be fixed"

    To which the proper response should be : we're not saying you're wrong, we're saying you will not be paid until they are fixed.

    Why does nobody have the balls to do that ? Because nobody's going to do that.

    1. Warm Braw

      Re: "we are saying they will not be fixed"

      Because (most) local authorities no longer have money to engage in protracted legal disputes and Capita has a strong incentive to take any dispute as far as it will go.

  4. katrinab Silver badge
    Headmaster

    Spelling error in headline

    The correct spelling of the company name is "Crapita"

  5. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
    Pirate

    Capita : Newest member of the HP

    School of Business Management.

    Crapita is a perfect name.

    Abandon hope all ye who do business with this bunch of Pirates.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Academy

    I used to work for a LA and had did a lot of work with the R&B team. We had the in house software and it always felt as if it was held together with string then.

    A/C to protect the guilty.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Academy

      " did a lot of work with the R&B team."

      Are you from the council?

      No ma'am, we're musicians.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Academy

        "No ma'am, we're musicians."

        Please don't tell anybody I work for the council, my mother thinks I play the piano in a brothel.

        (Given the way some senior council staff misbehave, that might not be too far off the truth)

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Academy

          "(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!

          1. rskurat

            Re: Academy

            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.

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Academy

            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.

  7. sbt
    Paris Hilton

    Where's my hamster?

    ...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.

    1. Anonymous Coward Silver badge

      Re: Where's my hamster?

      Or, the bug was just user-error in the first place.

      Or it was fixed when fixing something else.

      1. Lazlo Woodbine

        Re: Where's my hamster?

        "Or it was fixed when fixing something else."

        Extremely unlikely, usually one bug fixed leads to six fresh bug reports...

      2. sbt
        Facepalm

        Maybe that's how Capita does it, but decent vendors handle issues properly

        ... 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.

  8. Amentheist

    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.

  9. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    WONTFIX?

    Where have I heard that before?

    There must be some systemd fans at work there.

  10. Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

    "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.

  11. localzuk Silver badge

    We had a company that did this with our bug reports...

    Open for 14 months. Moved to a different supplier. Only way forward! Time for councils to vote with their wallets, or more accurately, our wallets.

    1. Lazlo Woodbine

      Re: We had a company that did this with our bug reports...

      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...

  12. Zog_but_not_the_first
    Facepalm

    Crapita again.....

    And still they get the contracts. Who's getting the bungs?

  13. Dwarf

    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.

    1. Jimmy2Cows Silver badge

      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.

  14. Fading
    Holmes

    Hmm

    I guess that many of these bugs would have been raised during the warranty period - if they are then re-raised this would be seen as a "new" bug and hence be chargeable/deducted from included contracted developer time rather than at Capita's cost?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hmm

      The customer would be under a maintenance contract with Capita, so wouldn't have to pay for bug fixes while they are using the system. More likely they will just bury it for another 12 months and close it again.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I now longer have to deal with Capita on a day to day basis thankfully, but I bet a few of those tickets were ones I'd raised over the last few years, I checked just before leaving my last job and some of my outstanding tickets were 3 years old...

  16. hoola Silver badge

    It's the new way

    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.

    1. rskurat

      Re: It's the new way

      wouldn't be surprised if 'hot desking' was invented by PwC or EY

  17. Raedwald Bretwalda

    But the bug reports will still be visible and the bugs can be reopened? It would be a shame if a helpful person were to write a small program to scan through for all the bugs that have been closed in this way and automatically request that each were reopened?

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