Eliminate the spinning circle of death bug in the OVO Beyond app

I’m not here to rank up points, I’m here because I’ve got problems with OVO’s software.

As you seem to be involved in that software can you investigate and explain to me what is going wrong ?.

• I’m still being auto-billed £80 pm for a PAYG account that was closed last July, even when I was assured that had been cancelled.

• I can’t register for my account, and the reason given by OVO Chat doesn’t match the error message I see when I try to register.

• My statements include calculations that defy logic.

All these issues are caused by faulty software, and I am concerned that if items such as these are wrong then there is probably lots more broken in the OVO software world.

Your statement about your code being tested means nothing. The £500,000 disaster was caused by software which had been running perfectly for over 5 years before some cocky engineer decided to re-use it.

In my software world, where lives are at risk, no change is ever made without fully evaluating the consequences. We don’t just ‘cut and paste’ snippets. We don’t test software we wrote ourselves. We don’t release ‘mostly working, with just a few bugs to iron out’.

This is a lot different to your world, where it’s just numbers being shuffled, and the worst outcome is an irate customer.

The news is always reporting some banking failure, data theft, or social media breakdown. The vast majority of these are caused by poor testing. ( I have a friend who worked in banking software testing, and the stories he told me about it are very worrying !. )

As I said, I’m not here to gain points, and I don’t know why you think I am.

All OVO staff here have _OVO at the end of their names such as Tim_OVO, unless someone abuses it which happens from time to time. You’ll notice I don’t carry that suffix, and therefore I’m not staff and never have been.

I’ve never touched the code myself and probably never will. I just happen to be very well known to many of OVO’s internal teams and have collaborated with them a few times to fix tricky bugs that stumped them for a long time. The code in this case relates to the refresh behaviour for CodePush, for which there’s literally only three possible options and only one way to write it - and it’s more of a config file than anything else.

Default: Which refreshes the app in the background and immediately restarts it regardless of whatever the user is doing - this can make it appear to “crash” and was causing a lot of headaches before I figured it out. Having ADSL Broadband does sometimes come in useful after all.

On Restart/Resume: Downloads can occur at anytime in the background, but the refresh only takes place when the app is restarted and/or resumed - each app developer can decide  for themselves whether they want their app to do it on one or both. It’s far less disruptive to the users because it’s less aggressive than Default, however, it causes a blank “spinning circle of death” during refreshes which can confuse users.

Custom: Lets the developer set whatever behaviour they want. OVO uses the second option with some custom text, but that was only after I originally got them to do option 2 without me reading the docs properly. So I fixed a bug, created another bug and fixed that one too - all in the space of a month. :)

So you advised OVO how to fix a bug, which created a second bug, which was then released it to the users, who then tested the code.

Or was that month spent doing in-house testing ? 

That’s a secret. :)

Organisations only keep secrets to protect their profits, or reputations !.

Let’s just say OVO isn’t the only place I do this for. I’ve done it for other places too. In actual fact, several companies appreciate my assistance - and I don’t even charge for it. Quite the opposite in fact, it’s usually ones I’m a customer of and I want to give something back.

There’s no secrets here to protect profits, literally just my personal wish to sometimes keep certain details to myself.

Also, I’m pretty transparent on this Forum overall - 6k contributions should tell you all you need to know. It’s just that in some cases, certain things I get told are under NDA between myself and whoever told me those things. One of the perks of being a highly user here on the Forum is we get very deep access into OVO, way beyond what most people would ever get close to. But with great power comes great responsibility.

I might well be one of OVO’s most trusted customers ever to exist, but if I blasted out every sentence ever spoken to me privately, I’d lose that trust instantly.

You need to be aware that trying to dig into that stuff won’t get you answers, especially not from one of us. More often than not, the secret stuff is information that won’t benefit you anyway - such as stuff that only the Forum Volunteers can do, or in rare cases it really is stuff that only I am allowed to know because it’s useful only to me.

I’ve got security bug bounties under my name as well. Not even going to say who with but they’re under VERY strict NDAs that are permanently and legally binding until the end of time. Trust me when I say this however - you do NOT want those security bugs being leaked into the public domain.

There’s a reason I’m trusted. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

As I said, reputations to protect.

I need to dig, because there is no other way. Chat is just a bunch of disinterested robots juggling six problems at once, with no ability to fix any of them, unless they fit the script.

An early problem I had went round and round for weeks, being pushed from one useless chat to another. I solved that one, partly, by sending an email to S. Fitzpatrick.

I fully understand that any company also would not want to admit their poor development practices, best just say ‘It’s a secret’ !

Since starting with OVO, less than 6 months ago, I have had three problems. These problems are all still ongoing. No one is able ( or willing ) tell me what is happening to fix them. If I want them fixed then I’m going to have to dig and push even harder.

Anyway, this conversation is not going to help me get them, so let’s end it here.