“The more eagle-eyed of you lot out there may have spotted on our Service Status posts that we’ve been trying to roll out the new sign up process this week, but haven’t actually seen anything go live. Nope, it’s still not quite live yet.

So, what’s the problem?

We’ve been working on this since August. It’s obviously a fairly major projects and is tied very heavily into our new PHP5 framework code. A lot of our problems have been down to the complexity of functionality that our sign up process expects from the Framework. We’ve had to make quite a few changes to this bit of code and that has several knock on effects.

An example of this is that our Faults Automation code, which is built upon the framework and integrates with BT, has needed quite a bit of change to keep it compatible. So, not only are we having to test the new sign up process in depth, we are needing to test the Faults process end to end as well. As BT don’t have a test platform which we can use for this testing, we have to use what we call ‘mock services’ to emulate this testing. These mock services are notoriously fickle and issues with them can set our testing back significantly (rest assured, all problems discovered are being pushed back into improvements to our testing platform.)

Anyway, lots of things that interact, lots of things to test, leads to quite an intensive testing cycle, and quite a scary rollout. I think we’ve now simulated the live rollout about 15 times on our staging platform!

We did attempt a full rollout last night, only to be hampered with a bug preventing business signups from working. When we couldn’t quickly resolve the issue, we made the decision to halt the rollout as we cannot afford to allow the project rollout to slip into the working day. The guys are back in now working on replicating the problems and fixing them. Once we are happy, we’ll attempt a roll again soon.

Cross your fingers for us!“

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