Sure, the software has a bug. Software does. Almost always. What is broken here is that it is possible to get stuck in an airport with no possibility of escalating sensibly to a chain of human beings with agency to resolve it. You could have a software process which works 99.9% of the time, and have staff at hand which could solve any solvable remaining issues like this one. They call the Home Office internal hotline, explain the issue, resolve it by manually interfering on the spot (and have a bug filed), and everyone carries on.
Instead, we demand a 100% correct system, and save money on actually having people around who can deal with the edge cases and make sure everyone has a good time. Of course, getting a project from 99.9% to 100% costs a lot of money, because that includes literally all edge cases ever (getting to 100% is as likely as reaching ∞ by multiplying any given starting number by 2 until you reach it), and so it will likely end up being more expensive in budget overruns than the 99.9% plus humans system.
Obviously, politicians must choose for the fictional 100% case, because they can't afford the cheaper 99.9% plus human one.
You still likely need a human bypass. "I was injured or disfigured so my face no longer anything for you to compare to. I do not now, and never shall again resemble the image in the system."
Similar things happen when you require fingerprints or retinal scans. "Well, I don't have a right hand anymore. It's in some hospital's incinerator."
And not having an override or bypass is a software issue. Designing a system that doesn't permit exceptions or overrides is bad software design.
> [N]ot having an override or bypass is a software issue. Designing a system that doesn't permit exceptions or overrides is bad software design.
I think his point is that the designers of the software would have been aware of this, but they weren't the designers of the system, who wanted software to do All the Things.
Yeah, absolutely horrible situation to put people in, let bugs stay unfixed that leads people to being stranded in foreign countries with no clear resolution in hours, and on top of that neither parties seem to be interested in just fuzzing up and fixing the fucking problem.
> Monique Hawkins, the acting chief executive of the immigration campaign group the3million, said it had seen previous cases similar to Webb’s, adding that it highlighted vulnerabilities in the system and it was “crucial that people have a genuinely stable means by which to prove their status”.
> She told Politico the eVisa rollout had been “rushed”, adding: “We regularly see people not only denied boarding, but also compensation, as carriers and the Home Office play a blame game shifting responsibility between each other.”
Previous company had full payments/accounts team, a few QAs, a couple accountants and SRE working on the automation of a specific payment edge case that was normally handled through support, and was taking 5-10 mins to handle per case. Whole thing took four-five months.
In the first year, less than 100 people used it, out of a few million. It was B2C, so after taxes, that amount was maybe enough to cover a couple days of lunch for the people who worked on it.
This is why you need to diligently track escalations/exceptions, and add more software support as the business case to automate or streamline supports it.
What's really stupid is not being allowed to get on the flight at all.
Like: she's not labelled as a "terrorist", so just let her on the flight as she's not likely to make the plane explode, and let the customs folks take her as a one-off to be dealt with on home soil. Why is it necessary to be pre-approved to even get on the flight?
Generally if you get turned away at the destination then the airline is liable for taking you away, so they won't let you fly unless they're sure that you will be accepted at the destination country.
I mostly agree but I think the bar for the software still has to be unusually high when the failure mode is "you are not allowed to enter the country you legally live in"... The human fallback is essential, but it shouldn't become the thing that makes a fundamentally unreliable system acceptable
Tbh, I suspect this failure mode is far less than the old mode - which is paper based and your passport goes missing in transit at the embassy (or doesn't come back in time).
Yeah the article makes it unclear but this doesn't sound like she was "stranded" for long:
> “I had no idea the issue had been corrected until I was allowed to board my flight home,” Webb said. “Had I not spent hours on the phone trying to resolve the matter, I have no idea how long I could have remained stranded abroad.”
Sounds like there were indeed channels to escalate this.
unfortunately this has become typical in Britain, no one can be trusted to have any responsibility or agency. its all systems with room for the real world
>and have staff at hand which could solve any solvable remaining issues like this one. They call the Home Office internal hotline, explain the issue, resolve it by manually interfering on the spot (and have a bug filed), and everyone carries on.
This may be possible some 15+ years ago. Home Office today is very different. Without a prober procedure written down I doubt this could be solved manually. Nor would anyone want to solve it manually.
You have a written procedure. And after a long list of known/common things the procedure has an escalation clause that routes to an official with agency. You update the procedure as needed to manage the escalation rate.
It seemed pretty standard at B2B tech providers. You have Sr support engineers who are the final line, and can often setup a reproduction in a test environment and file a good bug. Then you just count up the rate of tickets that hit that bug and require a manual fix. At some point it’s time to fix the bug.
> What is broken here is that it is possible to get stuck in an airport with no possibility of escalating sensibly to a chain of human beings with agency to resolve it
This is another instance of the usual hubris of management in thinking that automation has solved all the problems without creating any of its own, therefore all the humans are now made redundant.
“In the rare cases where errors are identified, the majority of cases are resolved within 24 hours.” The Home Office indicated the problem Webb encountered had since been fixed and that staff would contact her directly.
so yes, they can and do override the system.
Also the person wasn't stuck in the airport, they were denied boarding of the plane because there was an issue with their identification documentation.
It's not good, its a travesty that you even need an ID to fly between two european countries, let alone a visa, but the picture you paint is at odds with reality.
I've had issues with this e-visa implementation and was told I could not board flights.
As a someone in tech, I feel this a classic case study of how NOT to roll out a release and develop a solution.
The release was chaotic, none of the airlines staff were trained on how to use this. So they still insisted on the expired cards and then picked on the expiry dates.
Next, almost everyone makes you generate a verification share code in front of them by logging into the e-visa website even if the rules say I can print it out and just use the code. It takes a few minute to get on the website and generate one.
This solution assumed that everyone has access to a smart phone and a good wifi connection to make this work.
> Whoever built this didn't test it on the ground.
God this happens all the time. Software written by people that don't use the software themselves. It has happened to me so many times, I come across a piece of software with weird bugs or interactions that would be immediately fixed if the developer just spends 5 minutes using the software like an end user would. Dogfood all the things!
> Software written by people that don't use the software themselves. It has happened to me so many times, I come across a piece of software with weird bugs or interactions that would be immediately fixed if the developer just spends 5 minutes using the software like an end user would. Dogfood all the things!
My experience is completely contrary: developers typically do care deeply about such things. The problem is rather that very commonly managers actively disallow these poor developers to apply their diligence to the software that they develop.
I really have a strong feeling that you want to participate in the ugly vendetta against software developers that has been going on for decades ("Replace all software developers"; current season: "Replace them with AI").
Don't do that. Rather fight the people who are really responsible (who are often (project) managers or Scrum masters).
Sometimes it's so painfully obvious - that you can turn a piece of crApp into something that works well by just modifying yourself or the situation so you're following the path that the developers do.
Slightly off topic, but I strongly believe that the rise of "professional" CEOs was the beginning of the end for quality products and services. Before, you were generally an expert in your particular domain and was invested in solving the customer's problems.
"I really have a strong feeling that you want to participate in the ugly vendetta against software developers that has been going on for decades ("Replace all software developers"; current season: "Replace them with AI")."
Paranoia?
There are a lot of devs who don't really like what they develope so don't spend any time dogfooding it. Has nothing to do with devs who are blocked by management.
No, while the patent poster expresses their opinion quite strongly I have more than once encountered product managers and project managers who get almost personally offended when developers try to use their brains and don't just blindly implement incorrect specifications. If they have a vendetta I don't know but they clearly hate having to depend on engineers with free will.
That said I have also encountered lazy engineers who are totally fine with implementing obviously broken software, those are a perfect match for the egotistical product manager.
Shoot where I am at, it can also change on a week by week basis. This week, I can get away with some shit to improve the UX and depart from the mock up. Next week, if the feature doesn't look and function just like the mock up says that was handed in the case, I'm in trouble. No matter how bad it is.
>
There are a lot of devs who don't really like what they develope so don't spend any time dogfooding it.
Note that in my comment I wrote nothing about dogfooding - for a very good reason:
It is well-known that dogfooding leads to software that has rather few bugs, but also dogfooded software often shows a tendency to be "biased towards programmers and power users". So, there often exist very good reasons if the programmers actively don't dogfood their software, and rather trust someone else (who is very trusted by the programmers) that the workflow that the programmer should implement does make sense for the user, even though most programmers would implement this aspect very differently.
Okay, so what I’m taking away and remembering here is that if I wrote software for programmers/“power users”, I should dogfood as much as possible, right? :-)
>
Okay, so what I’m taking away and remembering here is that if I wrote software for programmers/“power users”, I should dogfood as much as possible, right? :-)
Lessons that you should be taking away are rather:
- Every tool that possibly might be good for improving the quality of the software is just a tool that can also cause harm if used in a wrong way.
- Deeply distrust keynote speakers and thought leaders who sell their method for improving the quality of the software or improving software development as a panacea. Every method is only useful under specific circumstances and is harmful of used wrongly. Keynote speakers and thought leaders who don't go into details when their methods are helpful and when they are harmful are simply scammers and snake oil salesmen and should be called this.
Well, I think you should always do that(if your constraints let you). But working with actual users and valuing their input is to be prefered of course. Every user can be a power user if you give them the tools so they empower themself.
I’ve been in the weird situation of working in a startup where the founder doesn’t use their own product. Needless to say I got out of there pretty quick.
I bet you 100% it was built not by in house team but farmed out to an agency for £££££ millions. They will have been saying in their case studies some absolute nonsense about how they saved the government millions rather than burned loads of money too.
Also for years prior it was explicitly said share code were _not_ to be used for travels and that airlines were not allowed to ask for them.
And now that they are the airlines do not have the system to check them so you have to print the webpage which also explicitly said should _not_ be used instead of the share code...
So did we, although we were in the end able to persuade them to let us board the flight by showing a screenshot of my friend's eVisa status from the UK government website (so secure!)
To be fair to the airlines here, if they get it wrong then the UK government fines the airline. This is why they are pretty risk averse, and also why I'm surprised that the screenshot worked.
> A Home Office spokesperson said: “Over 10 million people have already successfully used eVisas to prove their immigration status. ..."
So how many people did not successfully use it? Could be 100 million for all we know. Do they think just throwing out a large number without anything to compare it to is somehow proving something?
I would say what we do care about is the number of people who were not able to use the system successfully through no fault of their own. Even 0.001% failure rate is too high when is affects more than a few people per year. Especially so when there is no easy way to rectify the problem.
> Do they think just throwing out a large number without anything to compare it to is somehow proving something?
Welcome to the last 20 years of UK public policy communications. Politicians know that people do not question big numbers or have the skills to put them in context.
I remember the May government shouting that "more children go to schools rated good+ by Ofsted than ever before". Me and you would say, well, there's more children alive than ever before, so it's hardly an achievement.
It only launched in the middle of April (edit: middle of February was the switchover at the border where no other fallback would have been possible)
It sounds to me like this number indicates broad success.
The rough estimate seems to be that only about two per cent of border crossings use an eVisa anyway (British passport holders don't and non-immigrating visitors don't).
Even over summer that would probably only mean maybe 2.5 million border crossings, so the other uses are not at the border — they will instead be employment/landlord/benefit/healthcare checks using the online systems.
So for example, renting a new property, starting a new job, applying for a new benefit, or needing non-emergency healthcare etc.
How? How can a single absolute number indicate broad success? You can't read from it if failure rate is 1% (completely unacceptable) or 0.01% (probably acceptable as long as problems are quickly mitigated). Also what do they even count as a success? If someone is stranded somewhere for a month and the problem then gets mitigated, they did eventually successfully use it, didn't they?
The strongest indicator that the system is riddled with issues is in what they did not say. If they had less than 100 cases where the system initially failed and the issues got resolved within a few hours I'd bet they would brag about it.
> If they had less than 100 cases where the system initially failed and the issues got resolved within a few hours I'd bet they would brag about it.
That's a bit of a straw man though isn't it — could there ever have been as few as a hundred problems in a system of this complexity with four million users?
(It also moves away from your "hundred million people" somewhat does it not?)
I am sure it has not been a flawless rollout but I don't really understand the outrage here.
It's worth understanding that much of the news media coverage of this is tinged with anger, regret and disappointment: this is a system we would not have needed in this formulation if we had not done Brexit.
Small problems with existing immigration and border systems would not have made any news but they could also have been happening at a higher rate, yes?
We shouldn't have done Brexit, but we do need a system, and therefore we have a system that is less joined-up than it could be.
Bias in media reporting is a factor here. That bias is driven in part by feelings about Brexit and about a system that exists in this form because of it.
Either way, the fact that it has been used ten million times successfully strongly suggests it is basically doing OK, since it's hard to imagine many more than ten million uses since the alternatives became unavailable.
Glad to have your obviously authoritative review of the subject, though. I am suitably chastened for trying to show the broader picture.
I misread a thing. Actually the system went into force at the border in February — that is when people have only been using their eVisas instead of alternative methods, as it's when the border switched to using the readers.
The government did not even stop issuing physical visa stickers until the beginning of last month.
So again, this ten million figure does not seem to indicate a likelihood of massive, systemic failure.
If there has been massive failure, then I guess the government department and the two US tech multinationals (Accenture's global HQ is only in Dublin for tax purposes) will have to figure it out.
It's older than that. It started in 2018. January 2025 was when the system became eVisa only.
In this case I suspect that either there was a recent mix-up or that person hasn't travelled since she came to the UK or got settled status and never noticed the problem.
EU citizens in the UK since before Brexit only got an eVisa when their status transitioned to "Settled status" for instance and never had anything in their passports. But as long as their online account is up-to-date (i.e. linked to current passport) they can even use the automated passport check gates on arrival into the UK. Only issue since ~last year and especially now that ETA is mandatory for non-residents is to prove status to airline staff on departure otherwise they deny boarding, this is done through online account.
There simply cannot have been that many border crossings that failed this way — the eVisa system has only been in force without any fallback alternatives for a few months and only four million people hold them anyway.
Proportionally speaking most of the failures will surely have been non-crossing uses (electronically proving right to work/receive benefits/not have to ultimately pay/claim on insurance for non-emergency care).
What was the failure rate on the earlier system, the mean time to resolution, and the maximum time to resolution, and how does that compare with the current system.
Why do you have to ask? Because you don't have easy access to the data. Whether or not your nation has a culture of honesty, big scale communication is always going to be dumbed down.
Unfortunately there are more and more cases where "The computer says no" and then there is no human to talk to, and you are bounced back from one automated system to another...
I had recently a case where my title (Mr) ended up as my middle name in the system of the operating airline (it was perfectly correct in the system of the airline that I booked the ticket through). Two hours of talking to those two airlines did not help me. I had to buy another ticket...
I think this starts to remind me the movie Brazil...
It'd be lovely if articles like this named the people responsible for actually building the systems. It's almost certainly never a government department.
They'll have paid one the many software/technology companies to build this thing. Who will be hiding their shoddy crap behind their client (the government department that paid for it). There are some patterns that I'm sure would start to arise from naming the consultancies that are churning out crap.
Actually this was developed by the government, in a meaningful sense, but it seems like it's Entrust (more or less inevitably) and Accenture who are the outsourced parts.
So basically both US multinationals (Accenture have a Dublin HQ as a fig leaf)
> My favorite part of the UK’s eVisa was taking a portrait photo of my 1.5y old.
I have had to take photos of each of my two kids at six months old for passports. That was not a lot of fun (though it's nice to look at the baby photo for the older one now).
The terrible part to me is them saying "the majority of cases are resolved within 24 hours", this should be like a 15-minute delay at most when you can present your passport with its number which also matches your biometrics (as would be the case with twins).
I myself recently had a 10-minute or so delay due to a visa issue. I was departing from Johannesburg and was going to use my Italian passport for entry into New Zealand. I had acquired an NZeTA visa about 15 months before but didn't think to consider until checking in that it was against my previous passport number which I had since renewed.
When the agent said they were just having to double check my visa (while my wife's and children' were fine), the fact the passport had been renewed occurred to me and I told the agent about it which probably saved a couple of minutes of them having to work out this was the issue. They phoned New Zealand, explained the situation and within about 10 minutes the New Zealand side updated their system and I was able to complete my check-in.
The problem is there used to be a separate physical card (BRP), but the Home Office got rid of it and moved to this all digital system. In other words there is no backup method available to ground staff.
This sounds like a confused support agent. The system lacks a notion of twins - it doesn't link accounts via biometrics. The names are similar but not equal and the passport numbers would also be different, so how would their accounts be linked?
Perhaps they used the same email when registering by mistake?
Not sure if related, but the Spanish security kiosks are shockingly bad they had great difficulty reading faces, fingerprints, and even passports when held perfectly flat on their reading glass.
I have identical twin boys - when signing up for a bank account app and while completing all the associated hoops for ID, the second to do it got the rather dystopian error message 'an account has already been registered with this face'
I wonder how it's possible they didn't think about this problem. Considering everyone involved in building this feature, not a single person thought about the possibility of twins or simply people who are very alike? Also, can't people open multiple accounts?
I imagine that it probably went like this "what about identical twins?" / "Don't worry about that for now, we'll solve for it before we go live, but it's not in this milestone". Then someone pulls rank and decides the product is "good enough, we can't wait for all bugs to be fixed" and gets it deployed.
Just look at the "falsehoods programmers believe about ..." articles that pop up from time to time. There are plenty of complexities in the real world that people either don't know about, aren't front of mind when they are tackling a larger problem, or simply don't want to deal with in the here and now. Lost knowledge and new problems are part of the reason why programmers are discouraged from rewriting software from scratch and why businesses in general are hesitant to replace legacy systems that still work.
Based on my experience I assume someone mentioned the risk, others said it’s unlikely and only a small percentage, that we should care about the 99% for now. Then the issues isn’t revisited until someone impacted complains enough.
p99 is ok for web stuff, not for systems that impacts people in their life, but I’ve seen too often things being dismissed because they are edge cases (which becomes an actual real issue at the scale of a country of course)
What a pointless point to make. I’ll spell it out for you: related within a generation or two. There are no twins in my family that I know of for several generations, for example. Thus I would say I’m not related to any twins because I’m not in any meaningful way, even if there might be twins somewhere in my ancestral history.
If you mean that all humans are related, that is true but a completely useless fact in this context.
Because it probably does the dystopian tracking well enough, they don't care if it's not 100% accurate. Edge cases in the new world have no recourse, citizen.
Maybe they didn’t care. Identical twins are a fraction of a percent of the population. Excluding them (really, only half of them) from the customer base wouldn’t hurt noticeably.
What is strange is that even the best face recognition algorithms have false positive. So surely they must have planned for two unrelated customers resolving to the same embeddings.
One imagines they are far more worried about person X fraudulently claiming to be person Y than they are about occasionally causing problems for identical twins.
Obviously the solution is to accompany facial recognition with DNA tests.
"Known issue" and "you may not board the flight home" really shouldn't appear in the same system. If a database error can effectively invalidate your legal status at the border, there needs to be a fallback that doesn't involve spending hours on the phone
“Webb said Home Office staff promised her over the phone the problem would be fixed, though a confirmation email was then sent to her sister instead of to her.”
I suspect this case has origins less to do with the programming itself, and more to do with UK bureaucracy just not giving a shit, as with the post office scandal where authorities, including the legal system, blindly believing in the outsourced systems led to hundreds of false prosecutions and thirteen suicides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal).
To be fair, the rules are insane. There are several different ways in which you might be or become a British citizen, and there are five other kinds of British (non-citizen) nationality. Irish citizens are in a category of their own. And then there's rules for other EU citizens and per-country rules for everyone else.
This is not a software issue (not directly).
Sure, the software has a bug. Software does. Almost always. What is broken here is that it is possible to get stuck in an airport with no possibility of escalating sensibly to a chain of human beings with agency to resolve it. You could have a software process which works 99.9% of the time, and have staff at hand which could solve any solvable remaining issues like this one. They call the Home Office internal hotline, explain the issue, resolve it by manually interfering on the spot (and have a bug filed), and everyone carries on.
Instead, we demand a 100% correct system, and save money on actually having people around who can deal with the edge cases and make sure everyone has a good time. Of course, getting a project from 99.9% to 100% costs a lot of money, because that includes literally all edge cases ever (getting to 100% is as likely as reaching ∞ by multiplying any given starting number by 2 until you reach it), and so it will likely end up being more expensive in budget overruns than the 99.9% plus humans system.
Obviously, politicians must choose for the fictional 100% case, because they can't afford the cheaper 99.9% plus human one.
You still likely need a human bypass. "I was injured or disfigured so my face no longer anything for you to compare to. I do not now, and never shall again resemble the image in the system."
Similar things happen when you require fingerprints or retinal scans. "Well, I don't have a right hand anymore. It's in some hospital's incinerator."
And not having an override or bypass is a software issue. Designing a system that doesn't permit exceptions or overrides is bad software design.
> [N]ot having an override or bypass is a software issue. Designing a system that doesn't permit exceptions or overrides is bad software design.
I think his point is that the designers of the software would have been aware of this, but they weren't the designers of the system, who wanted software to do All the Things.
Yeah, absolutely horrible situation to put people in, let bugs stay unfixed that leads people to being stranded in foreign countries with no clear resolution in hours, and on top of that neither parties seem to be interested in just fuzzing up and fixing the fucking problem.
> Monique Hawkins, the acting chief executive of the immigration campaign group the3million, said it had seen previous cases similar to Webb’s, adding that it highlighted vulnerabilities in the system and it was “crucial that people have a genuinely stable means by which to prove their status”.
> She told Politico the eVisa rollout had been “rushed”, adding: “We regularly see people not only denied boarding, but also compensation, as carriers and the Home Office play a blame game shifting responsibility between each other.”
There will always be bugs. The larger process and organization needs to be setup to deal with that.
This is also a big problem at companies.
Previous company had full payments/accounts team, a few QAs, a couple accountants and SRE working on the automation of a specific payment edge case that was normally handled through support, and was taking 5-10 mins to handle per case. Whole thing took four-five months.
In the first year, less than 100 people used it, out of a few million. It was B2C, so after taxes, that amount was maybe enough to cover a couple days of lunch for the people who worked on it.
This is why you need to diligently track escalations/exceptions, and add more software support as the business case to automate or streamline supports it.
> This is not a software issue (not directly).
What's really stupid is not being allowed to get on the flight at all.
Like: she's not labelled as a "terrorist", so just let her on the flight as she's not likely to make the plane explode, and let the customs folks take her as a one-off to be dealt with on home soil. Why is it necessary to be pre-approved to even get on the flight?
Generally if you get turned away at the destination then the airline is liable for taking you away, so they won't let you fly unless they're sure that you will be accepted at the destination country.
I mostly agree but I think the bar for the software still has to be unusually high when the failure mode is "you are not allowed to enter the country you legally live in"... The human fallback is essential, but it shouldn't become the thing that makes a fundamentally unreliable system acceptable
Tbh, I suspect this failure mode is far less than the old mode - which is paper based and your passport goes missing in transit at the embassy (or doesn't come back in time).
Yeah the article makes it unclear but this doesn't sound like she was "stranded" for long:
> “I had no idea the issue had been corrected until I was allowed to board my flight home,” Webb said. “Had I not spent hours on the phone trying to resolve the matter, I have no idea how long I could have remained stranded abroad.”
Sounds like there were indeed channels to escalate this.
unfortunately this has become typical in Britain, no one can be trusted to have any responsibility or agency. its all systems with room for the real world
>its all systems with room for the real world
The vision that it evokes is terrifying!
>and have staff at hand which could solve any solvable remaining issues like this one. They call the Home Office internal hotline, explain the issue, resolve it by manually interfering on the spot (and have a bug filed), and everyone carries on.
This may be possible some 15+ years ago. Home Office today is very different. Without a prober procedure written down I doubt this could be solved manually. Nor would anyone want to solve it manually.
You have a written procedure. And after a long list of known/common things the procedure has an escalation clause that routes to an official with agency. You update the procedure as needed to manage the escalation rate.
This is extremely common
I wish that was the case. Not something I have experienced personally.
It seemed pretty standard at B2B tech providers. You have Sr support engineers who are the final line, and can often setup a reproduction in a test environment and file a good bug. Then you just count up the rate of tickets that hit that bug and require a manual fix. At some point it’s time to fix the bug.
> What is broken here is that it is possible to get stuck in an airport with no possibility of escalating sensibly to a chain of human beings with agency to resolve it
This is another instance of the usual hubris of management in thinking that automation has solved all the problems without creating any of its own, therefore all the humans are now made redundant.
“In the rare cases where errors are identified, the majority of cases are resolved within 24 hours.” The Home Office indicated the problem Webb encountered had since been fixed and that staff would contact her directly.
so yes, they can and do override the system.
Also the person wasn't stuck in the airport, they were denied boarding of the plane because there was an issue with their identification documentation.
It's not good, its a travesty that you even need an ID to fly between two european countries, let alone a visa, but the picture you paint is at odds with reality.
I've had issues with this e-visa implementation and was told I could not board flights.
As a someone in tech, I feel this a classic case study of how NOT to roll out a release and develop a solution.
The release was chaotic, none of the airlines staff were trained on how to use this. So they still insisted on the expired cards and then picked on the expiry dates.
Next, almost everyone makes you generate a verification share code in front of them by logging into the e-visa website even if the rules say I can print it out and just use the code. It takes a few minute to get on the website and generate one.
This solution assumed that everyone has access to a smart phone and a good wifi connection to make this work.
Whoever built this didn't test it on the ground.
> Whoever built this didn't test it on the ground.
God this happens all the time. Software written by people that don't use the software themselves. It has happened to me so many times, I come across a piece of software with weird bugs or interactions that would be immediately fixed if the developer just spends 5 minutes using the software like an end user would. Dogfood all the things!
> Software written by people that don't use the software themselves. It has happened to me so many times, I come across a piece of software with weird bugs or interactions that would be immediately fixed if the developer just spends 5 minutes using the software like an end user would. Dogfood all the things!
My experience is completely contrary: developers typically do care deeply about such things. The problem is rather that very commonly managers actively disallow these poor developers to apply their diligence to the software that they develop.
I really have a strong feeling that you want to participate in the ugly vendetta against software developers that has been going on for decades ("Replace all software developers"; current season: "Replace them with AI").
Don't do that. Rather fight the people who are really responsible (who are often (project) managers or Scrum masters).
Sometimes it's so painfully obvious - that you can turn a piece of crApp into something that works well by just modifying yourself or the situation so you're following the path that the developers do.
If CEOs were legally required to regularly use their own products as an ordinary customer, the world would be a better place.
Slightly off topic, but I strongly believe that the rise of "professional" CEOs was the beginning of the end for quality products and services. Before, you were generally an expert in your particular domain and was invested in solving the customer's problems.
"I really have a strong feeling that you want to participate in the ugly vendetta against software developers that has been going on for decades ("Replace all software developers"; current season: "Replace them with AI")."
Paranoia?
There are a lot of devs who don't really like what they develope so don't spend any time dogfooding it. Has nothing to do with devs who are blocked by management.
No, while the patent poster expresses their opinion quite strongly I have more than once encountered product managers and project managers who get almost personally offended when developers try to use their brains and don't just blindly implement incorrect specifications. If they have a vendetta I don't know but they clearly hate having to depend on engineers with free will.
That said I have also encountered lazy engineers who are totally fine with implementing obviously broken software, those are a perfect match for the egotistical product manager.
Shoot where I am at, it can also change on a week by week basis. This week, I can get away with some shit to improve the UX and depart from the mock up. Next week, if the feature doesn't look and function just like the mock up says that was handed in the case, I'm in trouble. No matter how bad it is.
> There are a lot of devs who don't really like what they develope so don't spend any time dogfooding it.
Note that in my comment I wrote nothing about dogfooding - for a very good reason:
It is well-known that dogfooding leads to software that has rather few bugs, but also dogfooded software often shows a tendency to be "biased towards programmers and power users". So, there often exist very good reasons if the programmers actively don't dogfood their software, and rather trust someone else (who is very trusted by the programmers) that the workflow that the programmer should implement does make sense for the user, even though most programmers would implement this aspect very differently.
Okay, so what I’m taking away and remembering here is that if I wrote software for programmers/“power users”, I should dogfood as much as possible, right? :-)
> Okay, so what I’m taking away and remembering here is that if I wrote software for programmers/“power users”, I should dogfood as much as possible, right? :-)
Lessons that you should be taking away are rather:
- Every tool that possibly might be good for improving the quality of the software is just a tool that can also cause harm if used in a wrong way.
- Deeply distrust keynote speakers and thought leaders who sell their method for improving the quality of the software or improving software development as a panacea. Every method is only useful under specific circumstances and is harmful of used wrongly. Keynote speakers and thought leaders who don't go into details when their methods are helpful and when they are harmful are simply scammers and snake oil salesmen and should be called this.
Well, I think you should always do that(if your constraints let you). But working with actual users and valuing their input is to be prefered of course. Every user can be a power user if you give them the tools so they empower themself.
I’ve been in the weird situation of working in a startup where the founder doesn’t use their own product. Needless to say I got out of there pretty quick.
I bet you 100% it was built not by in house team but farmed out to an agency for £££££ millions. They will have been saying in their case studies some absolute nonsense about how they saved the government millions rather than burned loads of money too.
and the sales people promised it would be 100% reliable.
This is the classic difference between testing whether the software works and testing whether the system works
> As a someone in tech
Computer says no.
Also for years prior it was explicitly said share code were _not_ to be used for travels and that airlines were not allowed to ask for them.
And now that they are the airlines do not have the system to check them so you have to print the webpage which also explicitly said should _not_ be used instead of the share code...
So did we, although we were in the end able to persuade them to let us board the flight by showing a screenshot of my friend's eVisa status from the UK government website (so secure!)
To be fair to the airlines here, if they get it wrong then the UK government fines the airline. This is why they are pretty risk averse, and also why I'm surprised that the screenshot worked.
If you would lie with screenshot, it is a forgery of official documents, and airline can sue you for damages.
How did they roll it out embassy without having at least some old systemd or a human in the loop backup working?
> ... without having at least some old systemd ...
Back in my day, visas were handled by init scripts. And we like it that way!
But with systemd you can start deportation procedures while waiting for the rest to resolve.
> A Home Office spokesperson said: “Over 10 million people have already successfully used eVisas to prove their immigration status. ..."
So how many people did not successfully use it? Could be 100 million for all we know. Do they think just throwing out a large number without anything to compare it to is somehow proving something?
I would say what we do care about is the number of people who were not able to use the system successfully through no fault of their own. Even 0.001% failure rate is too high when is affects more than a few people per year. Especially so when there is no easy way to rectify the problem.
> Do they think just throwing out a large number without anything to compare it to is somehow proving something?
Welcome to the last 20 years of UK public policy communications. Politicians know that people do not question big numbers or have the skills to put them in context.
I remember the May government shouting that "more children go to schools rated good+ by Ofsted than ever before". Me and you would say, well, there's more children alive than ever before, so it's hardly an achievement.
It only launched in the middle of April (edit: middle of February was the switchover at the border where no other fallback would have been possible)
It sounds to me like this number indicates broad success.
The rough estimate seems to be that only about two per cent of border crossings use an eVisa anyway (British passport holders don't and non-immigrating visitors don't).
Even over summer that would probably only mean maybe 2.5 million border crossings, so the other uses are not at the border — they will instead be employment/landlord/benefit/healthcare checks using the online systems.
So for example, renting a new property, starting a new job, applying for a new benefit, or needing non-emergency healthcare etc.
How? How can a single absolute number indicate broad success? You can't read from it if failure rate is 1% (completely unacceptable) or 0.01% (probably acceptable as long as problems are quickly mitigated). Also what do they even count as a success? If someone is stranded somewhere for a month and the problem then gets mitigated, they did eventually successfully use it, didn't they?
The strongest indicator that the system is riddled with issues is in what they did not say. If they had less than 100 cases where the system initially failed and the issues got resolved within a few hours I'd bet they would brag about it.
> If they had less than 100 cases where the system initially failed and the issues got resolved within a few hours I'd bet they would brag about it.
That's a bit of a straw man though isn't it — could there ever have been as few as a hundred problems in a system of this complexity with four million users?
(It also moves away from your "hundred million people" somewhat does it not?)
I am sure it has not been a flawless rollout but I don't really understand the outrage here.
It's worth understanding that much of the news media coverage of this is tinged with anger, regret and disappointment: this is a system we would not have needed in this formulation if we had not done Brexit.
Small problems with existing immigration and border systems would not have made any news but they could also have been happening at a higher rate, yes?
We shouldn't have done Brexit, but we do need a system, and therefore we have a system that is less joined-up than it could be.
This is a question about numeracy, not "flawless rollouts." It certainly isn't a question about Brexit.
Bias in media reporting is a factor here. That bias is driven in part by feelings about Brexit and about a system that exists in this form because of it.
Either way, the fact that it has been used ten million times successfully strongly suggests it is basically doing OK, since it's hard to imagine many more than ten million uses since the alternatives became unavailable.
Glad to have your obviously authoritative review of the subject, though. I am suitably chastened for trying to show the broader picture.
The eVisa system launched on 1st Jan 2025 (https://righttoremain.org.uk/update-on-evisa-transition/).
I misread a thing. Actually the system went into force at the border in February — that is when people have only been using their eVisas instead of alternative methods, as it's when the border switched to using the readers.
The government did not even stop issuing physical visa stickers until the beginning of last month.
So again, this ten million figure does not seem to indicate a likelihood of massive, systemic failure.
If there has been massive failure, then I guess the government department and the two US tech multinationals (Accenture's global HQ is only in Dublin for tax purposes) will have to figure it out.
It's older than that. It started in 2018. January 2025 was when the system became eVisa only.
In this case I suspect that either there was a recent mix-up or that person hasn't travelled since she came to the UK or got settled status and never noticed the problem.
EU citizens in the UK since before Brexit only got an eVisa when their status transitioned to "Settled status" for instance and never had anything in their passports. But as long as their online account is up-to-date (i.e. linked to current passport) they can even use the automated passport check gates on arrival into the UK. Only issue since ~last year and especially now that ETA is mandatory for non-residents is to prove status to airline staff on departure otherwise they deny boarding, this is done through online account.
That does make the 10 million figure more meaningful but I still think it is doing a lot of work rhetorically
Without the total number of attempts, number of failures and ideally how those failures are distributed, it tells us almost nothing
There simply cannot have been that many border crossings that failed this way — the eVisa system has only been in force without any fallback alternatives for a few months and only four million people hold them anyway.
Proportionally speaking most of the failures will surely have been non-crossing uses (electronically proving right to work/receive benefits/not have to ultimately pay/claim on insurance for non-emergency care).
What was the failure rate on the earlier system, the mean time to resolution, and the maximum time to resolution, and how does that compare with the current system.
Look, I'm robbing you but you have to consider that 99.9% of people never get robbed so really it's not something anyone should care about.
Why do you have to ask? Because you don't have easy access to the data. Whether or not your nation has a culture of honesty, big scale communication is always going to be dumbed down.
Unfortunately there are more and more cases where "The computer says no" and then there is no human to talk to, and you are bounced back from one automated system to another...
I had recently a case where my title (Mr) ended up as my middle name in the system of the operating airline (it was perfectly correct in the system of the airline that I booked the ticket through). Two hours of talking to those two airlines did not help me. I had to buy another ticket...
I think this starts to remind me the movie Brazil...
It'd be lovely if articles like this named the people responsible for actually building the systems. It's almost certainly never a government department.
They'll have paid one the many software/technology companies to build this thing. Who will be hiding their shoddy crap behind their client (the government department that paid for it). There are some patterns that I'm sure would start to arise from naming the consultancies that are churning out crap.
Actually this was developed by the government, in a meaningful sense, but it seems like it's Entrust (more or less inevitably) and Accenture who are the outsourced parts.
So basically both US multinationals (Accenture have a Dublin HQ as a fig leaf)
Accenture …that tracks
Would it make any difference? Fujitsu wrote software so buggy that innocent people got fined and put in prison. They still get contracts even today.
My favorite part of the UK’s eVisa was taking a portrait photo of my 1.5y old.
I was losing my sanity over all the refusals (app refusing the photos).
> My favorite part of the UK’s eVisa was taking a portrait photo of my 1.5y old.
I have had to take photos of each of my two kids at six months old for passports. That was not a lot of fun (though it's nice to look at the baby photo for the older one now).
I had professional photographers (guy at timpsons) do it with when my kids were that age. Was a doddle and cost about £5
The hilarity of having to compare a baby picture with a 5 year old kid stood in front of you is a separate problem.
The terrible part to me is them saying "the majority of cases are resolved within 24 hours", this should be like a 15-minute delay at most when you can present your passport with its number which also matches your biometrics (as would be the case with twins).
I myself recently had a 10-minute or so delay due to a visa issue. I was departing from Johannesburg and was going to use my Italian passport for entry into New Zealand. I had acquired an NZeTA visa about 15 months before but didn't think to consider until checking in that it was against my previous passport number which I had since renewed.
When the agent said they were just having to double check my visa (while my wife's and children' were fine), the fact the passport had been renewed occurred to me and I told the agent about it which probably saved a couple of minutes of them having to work out this was the issue. They phoned New Zealand, explained the situation and within about 10 minutes the New Zealand side updated their system and I was able to complete my check-in.
The problem is there used to be a separate physical card (BRP), but the Home Office got rid of it and moved to this all digital system. In other words there is no backup method available to ground staff.
One of the reasons I’m applying for a British passport. Existing purely in some mystery database like that seems risky long term
This sounds like a confused support agent. The system lacks a notion of twins - it doesn't link accounts via biometrics. The names are similar but not equal and the passport numbers would also be different, so how would their accounts be linked? Perhaps they used the same email when registering by mistake?
Not sure if related, but the Spanish security kiosks are shockingly bad they had great difficulty reading faces, fingerprints, and even passports when held perfectly flat on their reading glass.
I have identical twin boys - when signing up for a bank account app and while completing all the associated hoops for ID, the second to do it got the rather dystopian error message 'an account has already been registered with this face'
I wonder how it's possible they didn't think about this problem. Considering everyone involved in building this feature, not a single person thought about the possibility of twins or simply people who are very alike? Also, can't people open multiple accounts?
I imagine that it probably went like this "what about identical twins?" / "Don't worry about that for now, we'll solve for it before we go live, but it's not in this milestone". Then someone pulls rank and decides the product is "good enough, we can't wait for all bugs to be fixed" and gets it deployed.
Issues get closed to make the metrics look good, not because they’re actually fixed.
Just look at the "falsehoods programmers believe about ..." articles that pop up from time to time. There are plenty of complexities in the real world that people either don't know about, aren't front of mind when they are tackling a larger problem, or simply don't want to deal with in the here and now. Lost knowledge and new problems are part of the reason why programmers are discouraged from rewriting software from scratch and why businesses in general are hesitant to replace legacy systems that still work.
That's true, but those lists are interesting because they aren't full of things you should be learning in primary school.
Based on my experience I assume someone mentioned the risk, others said it’s unlikely and only a small percentage, that we should care about the 99% for now. Then the issues isn’t revisited until someone impacted complains enough.
p99 is ok for web stuff, not for systems that impacts people in their life, but I’ve seen too often things being dismissed because they are edge cases (which becomes an actual real issue at the scale of a country of course)
Which is pretty absurd because twins aren’t even that uncommon. I would bet most people on the planet know or are related to twins.
Every person on the planet is related to twins.
What a pointless point to make. I’ll spell it out for you: related within a generation or two. There are no twins in my family that I know of for several generations, for example. Thus I would say I’m not related to any twins because I’m not in any meaningful way, even if there might be twins somewhere in my ancestral history.
If you mean that all humans are related, that is true but a completely useless fact in this context.
Not every word in a conversation needs to be useful.
Apparently not even entire replies, so I’ll join in with one.
Because it probably does the dystopian tracking well enough, they don't care if it's not 100% accurate. Edge cases in the new world have no recourse, citizen.
It's one of those items way down on the list of "Falsehoods programmers believe...", way below everything on the names list (https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...).
Maybe they didn’t care. Identical twins are a fraction of a percent of the population. Excluding them (really, only half of them) from the customer base wouldn’t hurt noticeably.
One kid needs a goatie: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
What is strange is that even the best face recognition algorithms have false positive. So surely they must have planned for two unrelated customers resolving to the same embeddings.
Anyone have any idea how this can happen? Surely the boys have different first names, so how can the system mix them up?
One imagines they are far more worried about person X fraudulently claiming to be person Y than they are about occasionally causing problems for identical twins.
Obviously the solution is to accompany facial recognition with DNA tests.
"Known issue" and "you may not board the flight home" really shouldn't appear in the same system. If a database error can effectively invalidate your legal status at the border, there needs to be a fallback that doesn't involve spending hours on the phone
The article doesn't give much more information than the title. Almost zero details.
“Webb said Home Office staff promised her over the phone the problem would be fixed, though a confirmation email was then sent to her sister instead of to her.”
Comedy gold.
I suspect this case has origins less to do with the programming itself, and more to do with UK bureaucracy just not giving a shit, as with the post office scandal where authorities, including the legal system, blindly believing in the outsourced systems led to hundreds of false prosecutions and thirteen suicides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal).
The Home Office does manage to be both cruel and incompetent, which is the worst possible combination.
It's the second worst.
How did we let something as basic as money and travel become so controlled?
Laws against persona; freedoms should be called out as unethical.
Cue The IT crowd: Made in UK. Ah, it makes sense
oups.
The story is about the British system not the EU one
She could have used a boat. Comes with a free hotel stay and no documents needed.
Jokes aside, when helping someone I know return to the UK, I wasn't sure if I have a stroke or someone who wrote the guidance had a lobotomy.
Clear as mud.
To be fair, the rules are insane. There are several different ways in which you might be or become a British citizen, and there are five other kinds of British (non-citizen) nationality. Irish citizens are in a category of their own. And then there's rules for other EU citizens and per-country rules for everyone else.
Edge case that needs fixing. Move on.