PlusNet Community Website

It’s Friday today… and the end of another busy Month (and Quarter) at PlusNet. If you’re thinking the End of Day is a bit early tonight, then you’d be correct…

but we’ve been given special dispensation to leave at 5PM tonight. That, and mid-afternoon cakes has made everyone enjoy this Friday.

Granted, Chris C from Marketing and Dan K, one of our Senior Managers are probably not looking forward to the weekend since they are both running in the Great North Run on Sunday - so best of luck to them.

Finally, well done to the PlusNet Football Team for winning on Saturday

Web Team from Rupert:

“Hi! My name’s Rupert and I’ve recently transferred into the Web Team from Development so that they may gain the benefit of my superior experience and elite programming skills in the front-end department.
The managers are back and the cats have their noses to the grindstone again. There’s been a flurry of activity in the department as we all excitedly beaver away at our projects and tasks, in preparation for a nice relaxing weekend.
This morning I finished off the work I’ve been doing on affiliate tracking, which allows us to report on the traffic that is driven to our site from third-party affiliates who very kindly place our banner on their site. This is very important as it allows us to assess the success of our affiliates campaign and encourage our affiliates to promote PlusNet even more!
The rest of the team have been working on:
- An improvement to the Community Site
- Problem investigation and fixing
- Continued improvement of House Move tool.
- Lot’s of exciting secret projects that we can’t tell you about just yet, but which you’ll find out about soon enough, and we hope you’ll be very excited about too!
- Eating cake
- Going home early because it’s Friday… Yay!
Hope everyone has a good weekend and see you on Monday!”

Finance from James:

“Today is Friday and true to form it has been a busy day for the team.
With month end virtually upon us, Mark and I (James) have been busy balancing forward spreadsheets ready for next week. Kate has been administrating payroll slips and answering queries whilst the other Mark and Fiona have been concentrating on finance tickets.
Today we have managed to close 145 tickets which is an excellent effort.
And finally ….. Mark managed to make his coke can explode over him for the second time in a week. Either he has a special skill or is just unlucky, either way it was humorous for us!”

Networks with Melise:

Howdy Plusnet Community…Melise here for this week’s wrap up from Network Services.
We’ve had our heads down and have been hard at work on building out a new datacentre suite in London.
Our Ticket Team have had a good week and have answered loads of issues coming in from our Customers.
We’ve been working on bringing some additional ADSL capacity into the network. You’ll hear more about
this next week - so stay tuned. One of our very own Net Ops guys even had the day off yesterday to play
in the annual ISPA Footie Tournament in London…did I mention we won? Go Plusnet!

Development with Rowan:

Alongside my main job of looking after the Remote Development teams, we’ve been doing some work to help ourselves move towards proper Test-Driven Development. If you don’t know the term, essentially it means that before we write any single line of code, we’ll have a test that tells us what it should be doing. In traditional software development, quite intuitively, we wait until we’ve actually written something to see if it works.

Sounds simple enough, but it’s a tough one to get rolling. It can also be a bit off-putting initially, because your first task is writing a test that you know is going to fail because you don’t have any code to go with it. There are two parts to making this happen across the company: getting the developers to write the tests, and then having a way that everyone else can see the results. In a geeky sort of way, it’s quite an exciting time at the moment since our internal framework is very near a release that incorporates both of these things - an easy way for developers to write tests, and then reporting mechanisms that show us the results of all the tests and also how much of our code covered with those tests.

We’ve also been busy setting up one of our machines to run those tests on a regular basis. Now, at the moment that’s going to be slightly scary. PlusNet has been going for a while and there is a vast amount of code powering all of it. Seeing how much of it is covered by our existing unit tests… well, the good news is that the numbers we get out at the end can only go up.

What does all this mean for our customers? Our QA department already do an impressive job, checking every change we make before it goes out the door - but one of the cornerstones of this business has always been automating as much as possible. Sometimes a small change in the code can have knock-on effects in another part of the system that the developer never anticipated. Getting a battery of tests in place means that we can catch these before it even leaves the developer’s machine. Hopefully you’ll see some more Dev. EOD posts in the near future when we start applying this to our projects.

CSC from Simon:

Today in the CSC we have been giving put the prizes for the internal incentives including Europes finest collection of Vino, Lager and Belgian chocolates! The Analysts have not been having these in the office but taking them home to share with their loved ones.

(1) Provisioning updates: Customers migrating in, problems with the lines (i.e not active) - 20%
(2) Router Setup: New customers with the incorrect username, or existing customers who have lost their settings - 20% (3) New Faults: Mainly giving the details of the basic no sync checks 10%
(4) Fault Updates: SMS or email prompted to call us to book appointment times, or further tests - 10%
(5) Email: Mainly config, but varied errors (users end) and several mailboxes that needed refreshing - 5%

Comms from Mand:

It’s been a pretty quiet day in Comms today. Which is good on a Friday, we all like that.

We’ve been missing Bob today, as he’s not in the office (honing his gaming skills perhaps? :D). Matt and James have been to lots of meetings and both Matt and Chris have been writing blog posts (you’ll see these next week as they’re secrets for now ;)).

James has been talking to lots of business customers and referrers, and I’ve been dealing with internal problems and Change Controls alongside my usual project work.

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This entry was posted by Colin on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 5:25 pm and is tagged with and is posted in the category EOD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a reply below. Pinging is currently not allowed.