[SystemSafety] Muddled thinking punctures plan for British ventilator

[Dewi Daniels]

I've only had a quick glance at the Twitter thread, but I've read the
government rebuttal.

The FT article suggests that it was naive to try to develop new designs and
that it would have been better to focus on manufacturing existing designs
under licence. The government rebuttal points out that the government's
strategy focused on three pillars:

1. procuring more devices from existing manufacturers overseas
2. scaling up production of existing ventilator suppliers
3. working with industry to design and manufacture new devices.

This three pillar approach seems very sensible to me.

I think the FT article underestimates the difficulty of setting up a new
production line to manufacture an existing design under license. The intent
of the third pillar is presumably to design simple devices that serve a
limited purpose, but which can be manufactured quickly and cheaply.

If some of the suppliers chose to create simple, low cost designs
that satisfied the bare minimum function, and these designs proved to be
unsuitable, surely the fault lies with the specification and not with the
implementation? The FT article seems to suggest that suppliers with
experience of medical devices would have known that the requirements were
incomplete. I think that greater care in specifying the requirements would
have avoided nugatory work. Nevertheless, I don't think the problems with
some of the early designs invalidate the approach as claimed by the FT
article; rather, the specification should be updated, which is exactly
what's happened.

Yours,

Dewi Daniels | Director | Software Safety Limited

Telephone +44 7968 837742 | Email d <ddaniels at verocel.com>
ewi.daniels at software-safety.com

Software Safety Limited is a company registered in England and Wales.
Company number: 9390590. Registered office: Fairfield, 30F Bratton Road,
West Ashton, Trowbridge, United Kingdom BA14 6AZ


On Sun, 19 Apr 2020 at 19:17, <yorklist at philwilliams.f2s.com> wrote:

> ... and a detailed rebuttal from gov.uk
>
>
> https://www.gov.uk/government/news/response-to-ft-article-and-twitter-thread
> -by-peter-foster
> <https://www.gov.uk/government/news/response-to-ft-article-and-twitter-thread-by-peter-foster>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: systemsafety <systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de>
> On
> Behalf Of Derek M Jones
> Sent: 19 April 2020 18:42
> To: systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
> Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] Muddled thinking punctures plan for British
> ventilator
>
> Dewi,
>
> > I've provided the Google link since the FT article appears to be
> > behind a paywall.
>
> An informative twitter thread:
> https://twitter.com/pmdfoster/status/1251434219139665920
>
>
> --
> Derek M. Jones           Evidence-based software engineering
> tel: +44 (0)1252 520667  blog:shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com
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