Over the weekend the Copilot website was not honoring the free weekends offer. It seems that there was a regression in the new website that we missed. Everyone who purchased a day pass over the weekend will be refunded and be provided a free day pass to use any time. This post will be updated when we have a better idea of why this problem occurred.
UPDATE: We have determined that the error affected 49 people, all of whom have been refunded.
Why did the Copilot website not offer free passes this weekend?
As you may have noticed, we launched a new website design this past week, along with many small improvements. As it happened, free weekends were added to the old website while the new site was under development. A bad merge caused the free weekend code to not be properly ported to the new site, and was overlooked by the developer doing the merge.
Why?
The developer doing the merge (ok, I admit, it was me) did not have this particular merge code reviewed by a peer.
Why?
Until recently we did not have an effective tool for tracking code reviews. Such a tool has been developed by the Copilot developers, and will be put into use in the coming weeks. That said, the error should have been caught in testing, and was not.
Why?
Because it is a difficult feature to test.
Why?
Because it requires a QA analyst to do regression testing on a weekend to be absolutely certain that the feature works, since we can't just go around changing dates on production servers to make our lives more convenient.
In the future, our new code review tool will help identify omissions before they make it to QA. Additionally, internal servers will be set to weekend dates for testing this particular feature. Finally, a QA analyst will log in Saturday mornings after new builds have been pushed to ensure that the free passes are being honored.
