Business Insight Zone

Is this what Terminal 5 looked like
when BA “tested” it?

Last week we talked about British Airways‘ nasty experience opening its new — and theoretically state-of-the-art — Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport. Well, things haven’t exactly stabilized:

• BBC news: Fresh baggage woes at Terminal 5

All this, even though the airline has sworn up and down that it carried out exhaustive testing of the terminal and all its systems before it opened about ten days ago.

Software tester Abi Sutherland has been studying the fiasco, and she believes that BA has fallen victim to one of the oldest fallacies of testing — following the “happy path” of use:

The very unhappy path to Terminal 5

. . . In software terms, there is something known as the happy path, which is what happens when all goes well. The happy path is nice to code, nice to test, nice to show to management. It is, however, not the only path through the system, and all the wretched, miserable and thorn-strewn paths must also be checked. This is particularly important in any scenario where problems are prone to snowballing. (Airport problems, of course, snowball beautifully.)

Based on the account I read, these [airport] testers were set up to walk the happy path. They were not paid for their labours, but were instead fed and rewarded with gifts. I’m sure food and goodie bags were cheaper than actual pay, but they dilute the honesty of the exchange. We’re animals at heart, and we don’t bite the hand that feeds us. We like people who give us presents. Getting those people — mostly British people — to act like awkward customers, simulate jet lag or disorientation, or even report problems must have been like getting water to flow uphill.

Furthermore, look at the profile of testers mentioned: an ordinary reporter and a bunch of scouts and guides. I wish I believed that the disabled, the families with cranky children, and the non-English speakers were just at another table at breakfast. But I don’t. I suspect the test population was either self-selecting, or chosen to be easy to deal with. In either case, it didn’t sound very realistic.

I’ve said before that BA’s protests about strenuous testing can be cast aside as mere talk. It doesn’t matter how fervently the company’s leadership wants it to be true that the tests were strenuous. Clearly the tests weren’t strenuous enough.

No, Sutherland’s view is much more realistic, because it’s grounded in human nature. We want things to go well. We work hard to make things go well. And at some point, we come to need — emotionally need — for things to go well. And so we suspend our rational faculties. We put the best spin on everything. We make rosy projections. As Sutherland rightly points out elsewhere in her post, we end up redrawing our Gantt charts so that “vague estimates” come to be “taken as hard facts.”

Much, much better is to take the approach that I’ve quoted before:

“Mr. Corleone is a man who insists on hearing bad news immediately.”

Oh, that we could all share the wisdom of the Godfather (minus the killing, racketeering, and endless vendettas, of course).

If BA had embraced this wisdom sooner, no doubt they would have experienced considerable psychological pain in confronting their own shortcomings, but they would have saved themselves a world of embarrassment — and a growing pile of pounds sterling.

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Previously on this topic:

• British Airways gets trapped on the baggage carousel.

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(Photo by James Cridland.)