Capitan PHP

So this morning I woke up to an email (well, several, but only one is relevant) from a WonderProxy customer. They had discovered a bug in the website. A rather serious bug mind you, as it stopped them from adding servers to their account, and thus prevented them from actually using the service.

Here’s how I approached the problem:

1. Reproduce the issue
   I logged into the website as the customer and attempted to reproduce the issue, no problems. I tried again on the development version of the website and reproduced it there as well.


2. Estimate bug fix
   I took a look at the code and estimated that I could resolve the bug in under ten minutes. The code base for the WonderProxy website is rather small, and bugs there can’t affect customer usage (unless they break the DB) so I wasn’t too concerned about accidentally taking something down. The short time frame for release also let me fix the bug before contacting the customer.


3. Fix the bug
   Found the bug, fixed it. Tested it out in development, checked other accounts to look for unrelated breaks. Finally I rolled it out from development to production and checked again.


4. Contact Customer
   Replying to the customer I indicated that problem was indeed on our end (the customer wasn’t using the site wrong or anything), and that it had been fixed. Additionally I had updated the billing period to reflect the fact that the account hadn’t been usable up until the fix was applied. As a token of appreciation I upgraded the account slightly.

Overall, I found the process rather pain free. When I look at it from a customer’s prospective, I also feel like it was a reasonable problem resolution.

I’d like to delve deeper into how this problem made it onto my production website, but that’s a separate post. For now I’m really just looking at the customer service side, there was a total of 67 minutes between the initial contact (on the part of the customer) and my reply with the fix in place.

Thoughts? How did I do?