Monday, December 19, 2016

Well, that saved some time


After getting our unit tests assigned to the correct team, I took a few days off so no post last week.  When I returned, I found a defect assigned to me saying that a unit test was failing.  In this case, the test was related to filling in missing values from a column of data that the user is trying to display in a visualization.  Now, to be fair, there are many different ways to try to infer what the missing data should be and there is a larger question of whether you should impute a missing value at all.  But the purpose of this test was to validate that in a range of numbers with a missing value that if we want to use the average of all the values to fill in a missing value, we would compute the average correctly and actually add it to the column of missing data.

This is not an especially difficult test and the code that it exercises is not all that challenging either.  If you ever take a class in data science this is typically an exercise that you will be asked to complete early in the class cycle.  IIRC, this was near the end of my first "semester" of this online program from Johns Hopkins.  (This was a good class, by the way).  Anyway, I looked at the test and realized this was not my area - a partner team owns that codepath now.  I simply assigned it over to them to investigate the source of the error and moved on to my next task.

My next task is simply TFS - Team Foundation Server - cleanup.  I am our team's scrum master, so one of my duties is to stay on top of incoming defects and help keep our sprint schedule on track.  This doesn't take all that much time, maybe a few hours per week, but being timely makes it much easier than letting the database start to build up.  So I devote a small amount of time each day into scrubbing through it.  After that, I will start digging into our manual test cases to see if automating any of them would be the next best step for me to take.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John

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