Robustness of software

In the English civil court case Bates v Post Office Limited, the properties of the Post Office Horizon transaction-processing system were investigated and argued. Anthony de Garr Robinson QC for the Post Office defined “robustness” of the Horizon software-based system. The concept of robustness was at the core of the defendant’s argument, which was that Horizon was “robust”, if not infallible. This article sets out that the vocabulary deployed by Mr de Garr Robinson is not used in this way in computing, whether or not it is conceptually clear. Index words: software, electronic documents, electronic evidence, computer evidence, robust