We recently asked for some of your holiday horror stories. We'll definitely take more, if you've got them, but we're going to start off with Jessica, who brings us not so much a horror as an omen.

Jessica writes:

I work for a company in the UK which writes legal software for law firms.

This raises the question what illegal software for law firms might look like, but I understand her meaning.

In the UK, there is a system called "Legal aid", where law firms can give free legal services to people who otherwise couldn't afford it and get reimbursed from the government for their time. As one might imagine from such a system, there is a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of complexity.

The core of the system is a collection of billing rate sheets, billing codes for the various kinds of services, and a pile of dense forms that need to be submitted. Every few months, something in that pile changes. Sometimes it's something small, like moving a form field to a different alignment, or one police station changed its rate sheet. Sometimes it's a wholesale recalibration of the entire system. Sometimes it's new forms, or altered forms, or forms getting dropped from the workflow entirely (a rare, but welcome event).

The good news is that the governing body sends out plenty of notice about the changes before they go into effect. Usually a month, sometimes two, but it's enough time for Jessica's company to test the changes and update their software as needed.

That's what Jessica is working on right now: taking the next batch of changes and preparing the software for the change, a change that's scheduled to deploy a month from now. It's plenty of work, but it's not a hair-on-fire crisis.

Then, during a team meeting, her manager asked: "I haven't booked my holiday yet, and wanted to double check who is available to work over Christmas?"

"Why would anyone need to work over Christmas?" one of the senior developers asked.

Why? Well, one of the larger rate sheets was going to publish new changes on December 22nd, and the changes were expected to be rolled out to all clients on the same day.

"It's just a data update," the manager said weakly. "What could go wrong?"

Probably nothing, that was certainly true. But even just rolling out a change to payment rates was not a risk free endeavor. Sometimes the source data had corrections which needed to be rolled out with great haste, sometimes customers weren't prepared to handle the changed rates, sometimes there were processing pipelines which started throwing out weird bounds errors because something buried in the rate sheet caused a calculation to return absurd results. And sometimes the governing body said "it's just changes to rates," but then includes changes to forms along with it. There wasn't a single rate sheet update that didn't involve providing some degree of support, even if that support was just fielding questions from confused users who didn't expect the change.

The point is that Jessica's team, and every other vendor supplying software to lawfirms in the UK, will be making a major production update three days before Christmas. And from that, providing support to all their customers through that Christmas window.

The only good news? Jessica just started at this job. While the newbie is usually the person who gets stuck with the worst schedule, she's so new that she's not prepared to handle the support work alone, yet. So it's one of the senior devs who gets to work through the holiday this year.

Jessica writes:

Thank god it's not me this year!

Oh, don't worry Jessica. There will be plenty more holidays next year.

[Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!