This week we shipped a new release of Handee, the compliance layer we built for multi-site facility operations.
This post is about the other half of the release: the things we took out.
We tell prospective clients that we measure one number, the time recovered on the work they hand us. A promise like that is only worth anything if we are equally disciplined about what we refuse to claim. Here are three from a single release.
A line we cut from our own release notes
Our changelog said we had added on-time completion tracking. The code was real. The service calculated it, and the database query behind it was tested and worked.
It appeared on no screen. Nobody using Handee could see it.
So it came out of the announcement. Capability that exists in a repository and capability a customer can use are different things, and only one of them is worth telling you about. The changelog line was written by someone who knew the code had landed, which is exactly how this kind of overstatement happens: not by lying, but by describing the work instead of the result.
A number we would not publish
The same release also published Handee's service levels: first response targets by priority, an availability target, data residency, breach notification timelines. Procurement teams ask for this document constantly, and having it ready is worth real money in a sales cycle.
What was not on it was a recovery time objective.
We did not have one we would defend under scrutiny, and inventing a figure that read well would have made the document better to sell with and less true. The page said so directly. It also said that everything on it was a target rather than a contractual guarantee, and that no service credits attached to any of it. We would rather publish numbers we consistently beat than numbers we owe money for missing.
Measurement before claims
The largest part of the release was analytics: where work orders actually sat, how long each stage really took, and what was ageing past the point where somebody ought to care.
We built that before having a customer to run it on, deliberately. You cannot report time recovered on a workflow you never instrumented. Measurement is not a reporting feature bolted on at the end once the interesting work is done. It is the thing that makes the promise checkable, so it goes in early or the promise is decoration.
The bug our tests could not see
The service level documents shipped. Then every page that renders them returned an error in production.
The cause was ordinary. Our build configuration excluded the documentation directory. Every test passed, because the tests read those files from the working copy on disk, where they sat exactly as expected. The tests were checking that the documents were correct. Nothing was checking that the documents were present in the thing we actually deployed.
We fixed it the same day and added a test that asserts the build context itself. That class of bug, where the test and the deployed artefact disagree about what exists, is one we now check for by default rather than discover.
We mention it because a company that publishes an incident policy should probably say what happened the first time it had an incident.
The point
None of this is dramatic. It is the ordinary discipline of not saying more than you can show, applied to a small release by a small team. It is also the whole basis on which we ask anyone to trust us with their work.
If something in your organisation is quietly eating a day a week, and you want it assessed by people who will tell you honestly whether it can be fixed, that is the conversation we like having.
Handee was retired on 30 August 2026.