Week 430

With James and I on leave for some of the week and the Good Friday
bank holiday, Week 430 was a shorter than usual working week. We
mainly continued working on the Manuals Publisher project for our
client GDS.

GDS

We spent a couple of days squashing
a
long-standing bug in
Manuals Publisher. The bug had manifested itself
on
the updates page for The Highway Code which
was showing updates to the guidance that hadn’t actually
happened. We
tracked down the
bug to a problem with how publication log entries are created when the
published date of a Manual is changed through the user interface.

Once we’d established what was causing the bug we were able to
recreate the incorrect data in our development environment. We
then
wrote a data migration to
fix the data in production. A pre-existing script in the repository
allowed us to republish the manual and fix the
issue. We
converted the script to
a Rake task so that it could be run on various environments
using Jenkins. This means there is a record of
the script having been run.

It was good to get to the bottom of the issue and to see our fix
having an impact on a public-facing part
of GOV.UK. Tracking down the root cause of the
bug also seemed much easier thanks to the refactoring work that had
gone before. This has given us renewed confidence that we’re on the
right track.

GFR

We hosted our
monthly Show and Tell
on Wednesday which was particularly well-attended.

After a brief retrospective of the week on Thursday we headed off for
a weekend of chocolate-eating.