Closure Report
Project Summary
The University's central CMS EdWeb is built on Drupal and PHP. The pervious version of PHP 7.2 reached end of life on 30th November 2020.
This project has successfully delivered the upgrade of EdWeb to PHP v7.4.
The project started with an appraisal to determine whether it was possible to upgrade from v7.2 to v7.4 (missing v7.3). v7.4 is to remain in mainstream support until November 2021 and security support until November 2022, one year longer than v7.3. This would negate the need for a further upgrade project in the following year. The review noted that with minor changes, the codebase supported this move to v7.4.
During the upgrade there were a few points to take into consideration along the way:
- The regular releases of the Drupal core security updates needed to be planned in, so the upgrade through the environments all contained the same release.
- The code changes needed to work on v7.2 and v7.4, this was so we could deploy the code change to all environments with PHP v7.2, then upgrade each to v7.4. Should rollback be required then we know it was tested and works on PHP v7.2
- INF143 Database upgrade project was a dependency. WPS005 was planned to upgrade after INF143 went LIVE, however INF143 load testing in TEST was 2 to 3 weeks behind, WPS005 was prioritised to go LIVE in December 2020 ahead of INF143
- The planned deployment of EdWeb v8.16.0 on the 21/01/2021 allowed two issues raised after the WPS005 deployment to LIVE to be resolved under WPS005: one issue was a pre-existing environment issue, whilst the other was a result of INF143. This was carried out successfully
Deployment to LIVE was successfully completed on 03/12/2020. TRAIN was completed on 17/12/2021.
The two issues raised after deployment to LIVE were addressed in January and rolled out with the EdWeb deployment on 21/01/2021.
Objectives and Deliverables
All objectives and deliverables were achieved.
There was no scope change in the project.
|
Objective/Deliverable Ref |
Description |
Priority |
Owner |
Achieved? |
| O1 | To establish the PHP version to upgrade to | |||
| D1.1 | Appraisal carried out to verify which version we can upgrade to, and if the codebase supports that version (Completed) | Must | DevTech/Production Management/Software Dev | Yes |
|
O2 |
To ensure that EdWeb continues to run on a supported PHP version. |
|
|
|
|
D2. 1 |
Upgrade PHP across all environments DEV, TEST, STAGING, TRAIN and LIVE to version 7.4 as identified in the appraisal. |
Must |
DevTech/Production Management/Software Dev |
Yes |
|
O3 |
To ensure that EdWeb is functional after the upgrade |
|
||
|
D3.1 |
Resolve any issues that are a direct result of the upgrade |
Must |
DevTech/Production Management/Software Dev/WAC |
Ye |
Analysis of Resource Usage:
Staff Usage Estimate: 33 days
Staff Usage Actual: 28 days
Resource Variance: -15 %
Explanation for Variance
The project completed 15% under budget. The graph below show the estimated effort at the start of the project vs actual effort.
Key Learning Points
| Issue | Key Learning Point |
| Although this project was a PHP upgrade, there are a number of other factors to take into consideration when doing this upgrade |
Notes for future projects:
|
| The PHP upgrade to the environments overlapped with the INF143 database upgrade. This stalled WPS005 until a resolution was agreed with which project should be prioritised |
|
Outstanding Issues
There are no outstanding issues.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
 estimatedvsactual2.png | 20.76 KB |
