Completion Report

Project Summary:

The Online Print Credit (PCounter) application has now been successfully migrated to a new server and the PCounter application has been upgraded to ColdFusion 11 which will lead to an increase in performance, and more easily scalable applications due to the increases in functionality the upgrade to ColdFusion 11 gives developers. Maintenance patches will be released from Adobe until 2019 for ColdFusion 11.

Within this project we also moved the XPR SQL database, which houses the students print history logs, to a new server as its current server MIS-FORD had to be decommissioned by the end of May 2016.

The original system was at end of life and on unsupported infrastructure. It was on ColdFusion (CF) version 9 which no longer had support from Adobe, and the Solaris license agreement for the server it resided on (Morton) was coming to an end on 31^st July 2016. The project would migrate the application off Morton before the end of July 2016, and at the same time upgrade from CF9 to CF11. Part of the Print Credit application, the XPR SQL server database which houses the logs history for students, resided on MIS-FORD which was to be decommissioned as at end of life so the project would also move the database to a new SQL server instance.

Objectives & Deliverables

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 60 days

Staff Usage Actual: 65 days

Staff Usage Variance: 8%

Other Resource Estimate: 0 days

Other Resource Actual: 0 days

Other Resource Variance: 0%

Explanation for variance:

We deployed on time and we were running to budget until the deployment issues which put us 4.5 days over budget.

Cost

This project was originally in the initial proposal estimation at 50 days. However at the meeting to review the brief for the ColdFusion upgrade Production informed that the MIS-FORD server which housed the XPR database for PCounter was to be decommissioned by May 2016 and it would need to be rehoused. Production expected that the project would cover this move but there was no budget to do so as it was originally considered just a CF upgrade. Programme manager then had to source days from other budgets to cover this move.

Accommodating the move of the XPR database increased the Project Brief figure from 50 days to 60 days which was approved by WIS.

The project actually completed in 65 days. The additional time came from the following:

• WPM issues at CF deployment. An additional 1.1 days for a developer with domain knowledge plus 0.5 days of additonal deployment support from Dev
• Investigating and resolving environment issues after deployment took 2.7 days

Time

Issues

• Planning milestone was delayed by a week while we estimated the cost of moving the XPR database
• We then lost our development resource to SMI012 but were able to catch up
• We lost some development time while PM was on sick leave plus developers’ holidays meant that the project had to be re-planned. The end date of the project was not changed but there were minor milestone changes.
• We had an issue once the Build was signed off where we could not move the Upgrade into Test for UAT as Test was not working properly – the channel was not displaying. This turned out to be a certificate issue - the existing certificate had been replaced by a Quovadis certificate. This was resolved by restarting the CF server. We also had to restart the Live CF server for the certificates to update.
• Issues in UAT: not being able to access WPM to make a payment which turned out to be due to changes made by LMP007 to the Print pathway (LMP007 is updating the Print pathway to accommodate the Library as it is too expensive to set up a separate Library pathway) – Garry Robertson put in a call to WPM to get the fixes rolled back. LMP007 then postponed developing any further fixes until SMI014 had deployed to Live
• We were also unable to complete a transaction due to failure in the callback procedure - an error email was being generated every time a transaction was made. This turned out to be because there was a dependency of WPMSERV and the order in which the applications were deployed. And this dependency meant that the other CF upgrades that resided under WPMSERV (FIN and OLL) needed to be deployed to Live at the same time. Ben Armstrong from the FIN110 project co-ordinated the deployment as they were also making further changes under FIN110 that required to be scheduled in.
• Once Live a new issue appeared in Dev and Test relating to permission exceptions or event handler exceptions. Restarting the servers did not make any difference (as was thought to be certificate errors again) but this was found to be a new firewall rule blocking the ldap port – resolved with a call to helpdesk to open the port

Key Learning Points:

We had to deploy to Live along with FIN and OLL due to dependencies with them all being under WPMSERV. The dependency of these 3 projects under WPMSERV was not highlighted at any point in the development of the 3 applications until issues started to appear. It was only because the developer on the FIN project had the domain knowledge to understand the WPMSERV dependencies that we were able to take this forward

Outstanding issues:

At the moment passwords used by OPC in Dev, Test & Live are not in the latest revision of the code in SVN, but SVN retains the code history, which is where the passwords will remain accessible. The Bamboo deployment plan obtains the necessary passwords in each environment from Bamboo properties files instead and was updated to do this. However this fix will not remove passwords from SVN – this requires to be taken forward under support as it affects more than this project (JIRA SMI014-4 moved the passwords into Bamboo).