The disasters of the 'Prestige' and 'Ievoli Sun' each resulted in major environmental pollution. In the case of the Prestige for example, it affected major tourist areas and the cost of the immediate clean-up to the Spanish coast alone was £2.5bn. The CERS/SVD developed by the MCA will help to avoid a repeat of such disasters. Therefore, it was vital that software assurance was built in from the very beginning of the project, to minimise any risks to the lives of those at sea and the marine environment.

By working with TestIT, the MCA was able to anticipate and root out problems in the system and highlight potential risks to ensure that they could be effectively managed and their impact minimised. Ever mindful that the MCA is run on public money, working with TestIT allowed the Agency to obtain significant cost/benefit advantages through their integrated testing system. TestIT has now also raised the standard for future IT projects in the public sector, as well as ensuring that the MCA deploy a system which is fully functional and will integrate with other European IT systems.

John Morphew, MCA’s programme manager said, 'MCA has taken a strong, careful approach to ensuring that the legislative framework is correct before carrying out the technical side. By testing these requirements, TestIT helped us to raise issues in anticipation of their causing expensive problems at a later stage of development.'

Discussing the project further, Bob Evans, managing director of TestIT said, 'Too many testing programmes look only superficially at the front end, they are not rigorous about anticipating issues within the back end. The process we have developed with MCA is infinitely more valuable because it tests from top to bottom against the detailed and structured project requirements.'