Week 353

We reduced our time on Smart Answers this week and did a 3:2 split of days, spending Monday & Tuesday at Aviation House and the rest of the week at GFRHQ.

Smart Answers

Business as usual

With Erik now on the case, we had less of this to contend with. However, we continued to work on some in-progress items where it made sense, e.g. because we had more history/context:

• Chris got the landlord-immigration-check updated and published. This (originally Smartdown) flow has been in draft status and awaiting fact-checking since we started work on the project early this year, so it was great to finally get it published.

• I spent a lot of time continuing to work on fixing a bug in calculate-statuatory-sick-pay. I thought I’d finally cracked it and submitted a new pull request explaining the changes in detail, but having conferred with our contact at HMRC it turned out that I hadn’t correctly understood the rules, so there’s still more work to do on this.

Converting Smartdown flows

Chris continued on his quest to banish Smartdown from the app. First of all he got the renaming of pay-leave-for-parents question pages which he’d worked on in the previous week merged.

Then, since we’ve stopped using multiple questions per page, he removed the ability to display question page titles from the code. These were no longer adding much/any value. This change will also mean when pay-leave-for-parents is converted from Smartdown to Ruby Smart Ansers, the regression test artefacts will be easier to compare.

Fail fast

Unfortunately, there are a lot of places in the app which swallow exceptions and/or silently fallback to (often unhelpful/surprising) default values. We’ve been gradually trying to remove these. Last week I did some work on this around question options, but some exceptions occurred in production over the weekend highlighting some question option translations which I’d missed.

Chris ran into a problem where the very generic ArgumentError was being rescued around big blocks of code. He changed the code so it rescued the generic exception much closer to its source and raised a much more specific application-specific exception instead.

Tidying up

In preparation for splitting the question content up from the flow-wide i18n file into question-specific files, I moved outcome templates into their own sub-directory.

The Services module was added relatively recently in this commit. It introduced a different way to “lookup” clients to external APIs. I wasn’t sure whether this was the official GDS way, but I wanted to make the code more consistent by doing this kind of thing only one way.

Documentation

We continued to add/improve the documentation:

• Add docs for CI and deploying to preview (implemented last week; now merged)
• Bring docs into line with most recent practice (tweaks to release note format)
• Improve documentation for regression tests

GFR

On Wednesday Chris took the afternoon off to attend Amy’s UK citizenship ceremony - congratulations Amy!

On Thursday we both did a half-day on Smart Answers, me, mainly because I needed to respond to our contact at HMRC, and Chris, because he’d taken a half-day the day before.

The rest of Thursday and the beginning of Friday was spent doing company admin. I sorted out the payment of our Corporation Tax (take note Google, Amazon, Startbucks, et al!) and picked a pub for our monthly drinks. Amongst other things, Chris did some research into whether his pension qualifies for auto-enrolment, and identifyied items in our lock-up which we might want to sell or give away.

Music Library

On Friday, we spent much of the day working on the Music Library project in collaboration with Hookline:

• Amy shared a Trello board with us and I added all the physical cards from our whiteboard.
• I added time-limited URLs for the tracks and artwork to the CSV export.
• Chris made the playlist download links work correctly in Safari.
• I tweaked the application config to force the use of SSL.
• I setup daily and (hopefully) weekly database backups on Heroku.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Until next time.

– James