Train Fail

After  booking a train ticket for the HEA-ICS annual conference in Durham, this is the response I got:

Don't you just love inadequately-tested websites?

Dear None...

Got this via email after having registered for one of those discount cards.

It is interesting to speculate on the cause. If I had to put money on it, I'd bet that YouGov send these emails via a 'mail merge' application of some kind that merges on a name field in the customer database given to them by Costa. Perhaps this name field is blank in some cases, and the mail merge app fails to check this. (If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that the 'None' suggests an app written in Python :)

Regardless of the precise reasons for this error, we can say with certainty that it points to inadequate testing of the application. The developers have made assumptions about data completeness/validity that are not justified in reality. Testing with realistic data would have exposed those assumptions, prompting a simple modification to the code that substitutes a suitable default ('Valued Customer', for example) if no name is available.