Noexcusefor nothavingit stresstested
A LEADING software specialist has questioned why the Scottish Government launched an app just hours before the Covid vaccine certification scheme was set to go live.
Mike Rhodes, CEO and founder of ConsultMyApp, explained to the Record why the launch of the application on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store went so badly wrong.
Rhodes, an app optimisation expert who has worked with Deliveroo, PureGym and O2, said: “Fundamentally, the primary issue wasn’t actually with the app per se, (surprisingly).
“The issue was actually on the servers the app communicated with simply becoming overloaded.
“This meant that when the app was trying to get some response from them, it was left waiting until it eventually gave up and said, ‘sorry, no match’ or ‘please try again’.
“This message could of course have been more useful in telling the users that the service was too busy and to try again later on but the app couldn’t really progress any further at that point.”
But Rhodes said even a junior developer should not have made basic mistakes like those that led to the app’s problems.
He added: “Does this mean the app developers are off the hook? Absolutely not.
“Firstly, it is highly likely that those developers that built the app shell also built
QUESTIONS the interface to the back-end servers that ended up failing.
“Secondly, this wasn’t an unforeseen event. The developers knew this would be downloaded incredibly quickly and was likely to get hundreds of thousands of people attempting to register at the same time.
“Even a junior developer would know they need to undertake load testing – a software testing approach that has been around for decades to ensure that systems under stress don’t collapse and simply throw errors back to the user.
“The lack of this testing shows the significant inexperience of the development team, not just in the principles of building an app but also in the fundamentals behind software development in general.
“It can be fixed, thankfully, by doing nothing.
“As the issue appears to be due to an overloaded server/interface the app itself, it should start to function normally once that load has normalised.
“It does beg the question as to why would you launch an app with so little time between it being on the app stores and it becoming essential for everyday life?”