A Tale of Two Apps WHY DEVELOPMENT PRACTICES MATTER Zendcon Oct

Who Am I?  Chris Tankersley  Been Doing PHP for 9+ Years  Lots of projects no one uses, and a few that some do:  ank ank  Worked in insurance for 4.5 years  I know RPG! Zendcon 2013 Oct

What did we need to do? “Build an app for agents to quote and issues new policies online, print ID cards, and policy documents, and all the fun stuff associated with that.” Zendcon * ‘Fun Stuff’ was subjective Oct

We had this… kinda  Backend iSeries vendor supplied a ‘solution’ for our Personal Auto policies  Only worked with Personal Auto  After many years, support was dropped Zendcon Oct

What did we have? Zendcon Oct

We needed a solution  We needed something that worked with our existing backend, which had all of our raters and business logic. We didn’t want to switch processing systems.  Turns out we had two things – a web app and a “RESTful” interface to the iSeries. The interface used ACORD XML, which is a standard XML schema. We could replace the web app with a new one that understood ACORD! Zendcon Oct

What we decided to do  Build one!  Purchase one! Zendcon We went with a vendor with a pedigree in insurance. They had a Tomcat+Postgres solution, and since the magical black box talked XML, they were confident they could swap out their rating system with theirs. We’d be done in 6 months. Oct

Their Solution Zendcon More on them later though Oct

We finally build our own! We needed to bring our commercial business online to help sell it. We had the technology (but not $6 million) Zendcon Oct

Our Solution Zendcon Oct

Why Two Solutions? Notice how I said that the Tomcat/Postgres app would be done in 6 months? Zendcon Yeah… The app took much more time and budget than originally thought. How did we do a PHP app in 7 months and much less money? Oct

What was different?  Proper specifications  Development Lifecycle  Understanding your stack  Testing and QA  Deployment Practices Zendcon Oct

Proper Specifications  Functional and technical specifications are a must. If you don’t know what you are building, how will you know how to build it? Or when it’s finished? Zendcon Oct

There is a difference between this Zendcon Oct

And This Zendcon Oct

Development Lifecycle  Waterfall  Spiral/Prototype  Agile (SCRUM, Kanban, etc) Zendcon Oct

They used Waterfall Zendcon Oct

We used Agile-ish-stuff Zendcon Oct

Understanding Your Stack  If you don’t know how your stack works, it makes it really hard to figure out problems with things go belly up. Zendcon Oct

Their Stack Zendcon Oct

Our Stack Zendcon Oct

Testing and QA  You do test your code, right?  How do you prove your code works?  Can anyone run your tests or are they only accessible to certain people? Zendcon Oct

They used only “HP Functional Testing”  As the name implies, it just did functional testing. In the end, it was a very expensive Selenium.  While they wrote in Java, they did not use (nor understand why anyone would use) JUnit or other unit testing frameworks.  Because it was cost prohibitive, we could not run tests. Zendcon Oct

We used standard PHP tools  PHPUnit  We settled on PHPUnit for unit testing. It was/is widely documented and we even managed to get it to run on the iSeries.  Selenium  We manually ran these tests as we hadn’t worked out how to get it to run headless. Not a big deal because we had to support IE, which only supported manually running it anyway.  phpUnderControl  This ran PHPUnit automatically for us and built our documentation Zendcon Oct

Unit Testing Works!  Using unit testing and continuous integration, we were able to detect test failures right away. Being able to run PHPUnit on the iSeries helped us identify and fix platform-specific bugs. Since developers could run PHPUnit and Selenium locally, we had less regressions.  Since HP Functional Testing was expensive, only the vendor could run the functional tests so developers (even at the vendor) never knew when the tests broke. Since it was only functional, it didn’t find subtle bugs in the code. Zendcon Oct

Deployment Practices  Continuous Integration Tools (Jenkins, xinc/phing)  Build file with manual deployment  Custom deployment script  Hope and a Prayer Zendcon Oct

We went the custom route 1. Tagged trunk in SVN 2. Script checked out the build, SCP’d it to the iSeries 3. MySQL Updates were applied by the script This worked pretty well considering we could tag a revision in SVN that passed tests, which we could check via phpUnderControl. Zendcon Oct

They went with the last option 1. The code on the dev server was packaged as a WAR file 2. The SQL needed for the upgrade was put into a file 1. Sometimes multiple SQL files that would need to be run in order 3. A zip file was created from this 4. It was ed to us 5. We put the WAR file into place and ran the SQL files manually against Postgres 6. Tomcat was restarted tl;dr: Stuff blew up regularly Zendcon Oct

Putting it all together  Auto Quoter  Originally 6 months to production and small price tag. Ended up being way over budget and way over time. When I left, it had just barely gotten to where v1 had originally been. This was due to poor specs, poor QA, and poor development practices.  Artisan Quoter  We ended up 1 month over time, but much cheaper (even when payroll was considered). It ran on existing hardware, so the software cost only ended up being Zend Server. Zendcon Oct

Questions? Oct Zendcon

Thank You!   Oct Zendcon