The world seems to have discovered a means of getting to the bottom of things; litigation. In the last couple of years everyone has been busy suing everyone for all sorts of things. A case in point is the Samsung Apple story. Apple sued Samsung for patent infringement and Samsung paid. Then the reverse also happened. Talk of legal reality TV shows.
Doctors have been sued for their decisions which either led to some irreversible damage on their patients or even death. Remember the story of the Michael Jackson?
Either by design or whatever the manager is responsible for the actions of their juniors. This means that they will be held accountable for the actions within the organizations performed by their subordinates. The converse is also true where for instance a cabinet secretary is said to have talked about an issue in their speech when in the actual sense the speech was written probably by an entire department. It was hence not a surprise when this story appeared on the daily nation that the CBK boss could face prosecution as a result of a 1.2 Billion tender. The mention of money leads me to my main question. Are Software developers really prosecution proof?
Companies all over the world and even here in the motherland are embracing two options in order to acquire software. Procuring business support software from software vendors customized to their needs or having a team of developers who build the applications in house. Whichever the option is the revolution of technology means that the application support business critical processes. For a process be classified critical it means that the business grinds to a halt if that process cannot be executed.
A case in point, If a company receives its payments primarily via MPESA and that very service happens to be down at any one given moment then that company is not in business at the time. A number of things can happen to warrant such a down time. These can either be infrastructural or software related.
By infrastructural I mean the equipment i.e the server on which the software runs can undergo a fault while by software related i mean the way in which the software is designed failed as a result of a condition not foreseen(and hence not handled) during the development of the software application.Again whichever of these two happens if the software application is core to the business then the business will be in-operational for the given period of time.
Lets pause right right there.
IT has something called SLA(Service level agreements). usually this is in-terms of the availability of the service being offered be it Internet, some online application such as website up-time etc. A quick browsing over the internet will show that most service providers peg it at 99%. However this value is mostly quite ambitious and is rarely achieved.
Going back to the question and then include a bit money aspect into it. If a company makes a certain amount of money per day and then for some reason its supporting applications fails then its clear the company stands to lose its revenue. So far so good we haven’t heard of any software developer/ Software vendor sued as a result lost revenue. Neither has it been heard that someone refused to pay their bills because the 99% up-time SLA wasn’t met. Does this mean that the clauses for the same have loopholes or the legal infrastructure doesn’t even exist in the first place.
In the coming weeks we shall explore this avenue to see what options exists and determine whether software developers are prosecution proof?