It is far more complicated than that - the system would have been designed by system analysts, possibly working from a brief generated by one or more business analysts. It was then written by computer programmers and then tested by a (separate) testing team. Specialist code, such as comms or security software (as in a distributed system such as this) is often the product of a separate development team, as commercial developers rarely do systems or comms software.
Once the application has been passed by the software house team it should be tested by a separate team at the client, who in larger systems also use computer auditors to validate the results generated by the system. Even after that you'd normally have a live test pilot run with (hopefully) a manual audit to confirm results.
At all stages bugs are noted and passed back to the development team to be corrected. But the decisions sbout what gets fixed is ultimately down to nanagement, not developers. So just who do you prosecute?
More of concern was a tiny clip supposedly set at Fujitsu in Bracknell, in their "operations centre", where an operator seems to have been telling someone that they could modify transactions to correct computer errors! In any secure system this should be simply impossible to do. If the comms is corrupting records then the software needs to be amended in such a way that this becomes either impossible or at worst exceptionally rare. The error log which was produced later in the program I watched would seemto imply that comms errors were occurring far too frequentently. IMHO that is where the real IT issue lies. Who permitted these operations centre staff to make such changes? What was done to ensure that these errors were trapped and corrected? So not quite a development or testing issue - more a management issue, surely?
As to a "foreign company", hardly. Fukitsu was originally called ICL (International Computers Ltd) and were very British. Their software is allegedly still developed here, but they hardly fill me with confidence given how much of a bunch of jobsworths they at one time were (and still are according to.one acquaintance who is in IT management). My missus worked for them for a while; I worked with them on several projects in the past - which tends to bias us both somewhat
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