Weeks 38 and 39

This bumper instalment of week notes is covering two weeks, as I’ve been away.

Last week, I continued the work to keep a history of changes to a need in the Need API. I also took some time to increase the test coverage and better isolate the unit tests. In the latter half of the week, I travelled to Europa-Park in Rust, Germany for Halloween and the Horror Nights event. Whilst I was away, Lisa and Stuart performed some guerrilla user testing of Maslow with some of the Transition Team and GOV.UK content designers.

This week’s been a bit busier.

I finished up the work on an event history in the Need API and then worked on displaying the most recent five changes to a need in Maslow. That’s been a huge item of work, so I’m pleased it’s finally wrapped up.

David deployed Maslow and the Need API to our production environment, and we’re starting to enter needs into Maslow from spreadsheets. We decided to do this by hand for now, as every department has changed each spreadsheet to work better for them - meaning building an automatic importer would take a lot more time than it’s probably worth for a couple of hundred needs.

We’ve got our assurance work pretty much complete this week, and we can put Maslow live to our users as soon as some pen-testing has been done. It’s likely not to be until the end of the month, as it falls in the scope of wider GOV.UK work.

I completed a spike into associating Mainstream content with Maslow user needs this week. Thanks to some work that James has already done to the Content API to provide a way to return all artefacts with a given Need ID. I followed this up with some changes to Panopticon so that we’ll link to Maslow for any artefacts with a Need ID above 100000.

And finally, I started work on adding a view mode for a user need. Soon, we’ll want to restrict editing of a need to certain users, so a read-only mode is essential. It’s also a chance to do a bit of thinking about the best way to present a user need to our users. I’m going to continue this next week.