Gamble of the week: Quality software tester

Software hiccups are embarrassing for companies - and costly. No surprise then, that this small British tester of systems upgrades is winning over large-name clients, says Paul Hill.

It's an IT manager's nightmare: last Thursday, alongside a 16% dive in Tesco's shares, came news that one of the retailer's computers had mis-priced thousands of packs of Cadbury Mini Eggs (worth £1.50 each) at 1p each. Not ideal timing.

There was no lasting damage this time. Yet it shows the need to use independent specialists to test software upgrades. Having a fresh pair of eyes review complex code before it goes live helps to avoid these sorts of embarrassing hiccups which can cause untold financial damage and harm a firm's reputation (as happened during Blackberry's communication outages).

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Paul gained a degree in electrical engineering and went on to qualify as a chartered management accountant. He has extensive corporate finance and investment experience and is a member of the Securities Institute.

Over the past 16 years Paul has held top-level financial management and M&A roles for blue-chip companies such as O2, GKN and Unilever. He is now director of his own capital investment and consultancy firm, PMH Capital Limited.

Paul is an expert at analysing companies in new, fast-growing markets, and is an extremely shrewd stock-picker.