UK Child Support Agency computer system failure
The UK's Child Support Agency's new computer system, built by EDS, created a massive backlog of unresolved child-maintenance cases and years of incorrect payments, ultimately contributing to the agency's abolition.
The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.
The UK's Child Support Agency's new computer system, built by EDS, created a massive backlog of unresolved child-maintenance cases and years of incorrect payments, ultimately contributing to the agency's abolition.
What the software actually got wrong
The new case-management software could not correctly process the agency's complex child-support calculation rules and struggled to migrate legacy cases, causing the backlog to balloon into the hundreds of thousands rather than shrink as intended.
The new case-management software could not correctly process the...
The new case-management software could not correctly process the agency's complex child-support calculation rules and struggled to migrate legacy cases, causing the backlog to balloon into the hundreds of thousands rather than shrink as intended.
Requs AI Edge Case flags this exact pattern at the requirements and architecture stage — before a single line of code implementing it exists — so the assumption behind it gets challenged while it is still cheap to fix.
Beyond code coverage and "shall" testing
Root causes like this one rarely show up in code coverage or requirements-compliance testing, because nobody wrote a requirement anticipating the specific edge case that broke. Requs AI Edge Case and Requs AI Software FMEA are built to surface exactly this class of overlooked failure mode — before the software is written.
Surfaces this before code exists
Identifies edge cases like this one at requirements and architecture time, using the Common Defect Enumeration to catalog failure patterns seen across hundreds of real-world software failures — including this one.
Connects the failure mode to the hazard
Traces this class of root cause directly to the system-level hazard it can produce, so a defect pattern like this one gets flagged during design review instead of after it ships.
Find the overlooked root causes before they ship.
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