Finally, after a couple of false starts, the new signup project has gone live this morning! The roll-out procedure which we had in place meant that the failed attempts were not customer affecting and allowed us to find out what went wrong so we could put them right.

The roll-out this morning went very smoothly, each stage we checked and re-checked before going onto the next stage.

This has been an excellent achievement considering the painful progress to get here. Whilst there have been issues, each has been something that has taught us something and improved processes both in development and for our platform.

I haven’t had time to create some examples of how the new framework works - these will have to wait until one of my next posts! But the framework now allows us to deliver better applications and you should start seeing some more value add items using this in the coming months.

Finally, I’d like to thank everyone else in the team who helped delivered this - from across the company people have put in an amazing amount of time, energy and commitment to delivering this and it is that teamwork which makes PlusNet such a special place to work. I am sure that if this was another company this project would have either been canned at the first issue or would have not been able to deliver any of the items anyway to be able to do it.

Now, how do we make it better . . . .

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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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I’m one of the developers working on an update to the PlusNet, FreeOnline and Force9 signup process so thought I would take this opportunity to introduce myself and where we are with the project.

I have been at PlusNet overall for around 5 years and before moving to the Web Application Development team was a Lead Developer in the main development department. My main role in the new team is as a link between where we are and where we want to be - I’ll try and help Tam and Colin with how their funky new stuff integrates with our current system back end if necessary and also coordinating with the rest of the development team for general work and platform improvements.

The signup revamp phase currently being delivered is the first part of that journey for me - the look and feel is being tidied up and streamlined whilst being re-written using a MVC framework, but from a system point of view it will be the same underlying structure which in the next phases will be updated to be even more resilient, user friendly and incorporate some of the technologies we would like to start using such as AJAX. As i follow up this thread, i will try and include some examples of how the new MVC framework works with some code examples etc.

We are currently towards the end of beta testing - our main aim until launch is practising the roll-out process and thorough QA. It’s been a hard slog to get to this point as there were a lot of firsts that had to be learned but, as always, the delivery team has pulled together (the dedication from people involved has been incredible) and pushed on so that we are confident of publishing a great piece of software that, other than making it easier for wise internet buyers to become PlusNet customers, can be used as a focus point of how to use the framework to create or improve our software platform going forward.

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