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Last updated: 14 Jun 2021

smart-answers: Smart Answer flows - Development principles

Do

Make small improvements to the code before making even business-as-usual changes. See refactoring existing Smart Answers for some common improvements.
Make use of the higher-level abstractions available in the project, for example the DateRange, YearRange and YearRangeWithFixedStartDate classes.
Extract more higher-level abstractions where the same behaviour is being duplicated across multiple flows.
Model the domain of the policy/rules that make up a Smart Answer.
Ensure all policy logic is encapsulated in objects that are instantiated by (but separate from) the flow.
Ensure all presentation logic is kept in the ERB templates and associated helper methods.
Ensure the Smart Answer flows only contain routing (next_node) logic.
Iteratively develop new Smart Answers. Get a simply happy-path version deployed and build upon that in collaboration with the department and content team.

Don't copy the style of existing "legacy" Smart Answers (e.g. calculate-agricultural-holiday-entitlement).
Don't blindly follow the logic documents when creating/amending Smart Answers. This has lead to some of the problems we see in the "legacy" Smart Answers, e.g. policy logic being mixed up with flow/routing logic resulting in hard to maintain code.
Don't do big-bang development of new Smart Answers. See the point about iteratively developing them in the "Do" section above.