THE CHALLENGE
The Department of Internal Affairs Government Information Services group develops and maintains a suite of SilverStripe-based sites deployed on the Common Web Platform. This group is responsible for delivering government information through sites such as the Government services website, the data resources website, the New Zealand Gazette and the Government's digital site.
In maintaining and developing these sites, substantial effort had been put into customised features – such as a guided process to registering a new baby. The entirety of the Gazette front-end website and back-end management interfaces are comprised of particularly complex customisations to SilverStripe. While some features had been provided with corresponding unit test cases, much of the feature set across the sites had no automated testing. As a result, any changes required significant effort in manual testing. The particularly error-prone process of upgrading the base CMS had therefore been avoided and, as a result, the software base had grown out-of-date.