Day: January 13, 2016

The other coop and I have switched gears a little on our design for the csv reading part of the application; we have decided to use an existing nuget package for parsing the file, and we have set up the application to read all the different data files and build freight move objects in parallel. Our ssis package that builds the csv will probably be replaced by another teams application so we don’t have t support it, assuming we can convince them to take it on. We are all working in parallel on the application now. The full time programmers are mostly working on the analyzer, while the other co-op and I work on the builder.

The hardest part of this application seems to be the transition from one phase to another. We have most of the design done for each individual component but aren’t sure about the best way to move from one step to the other. We have decided that the application should save all information given to it, that all the freight move objects, eval objects, and KPI result data will be saved to the TPS database. We also have performance requirement that states that the application should complete in under 15 minutes. We don’t know how reasonable this is yet but that is the current goal. Coding for the application finally started later this week. We aren’t sure about the current deadline of June and I believe it will be moved to July. The other co-op and I ran into a problem earlier this week with our ssis package. Apparently our queries for getting all the data were way more expensive then we anticipated, and the additional load of us repeatedly testing the package almost took down an important production server. Thankfully this didn’t happen and we fixed the problem. My team lead did say that if a programmer doesn’t come close to doing that at some point they aren’t working hard enough, but I believe that was just to make me feel better. The other co-op and I have now begun working on reading the csv files and building freight move objects

More design meetings this week, they don’t seem to be stopping anytime soon. The underlying structure of the application hasn’t change design wise, but now we are at the hard part of figuring out how each part will actually works. For the builder we decided that the application would read csv files containing all the raw shipment information from selected source databases and create a freight move object which contains other smaller objects for load, stop, status, and other information. The analyzer would then take this freight move object and parse out critical information to be used by the calculator and store this information in an eval object. The calculator will then do basic calculations using this eval data and write the results to a new TPS database. The other co-op and I were tasked with creating an ssis package that would read data from our current database in a 1 month range from the current day and write this data to csv files to be used as test files for the freight builder part of the application.

I met the other co-op student joining the team today, our jobs for this week was going to consist of going to meetings and binge learning as much about supply chain, our current reporting structure, and the design of TPS as we can. That’s how this week went really, most of my day was spent in meetings discussing how the TPS application should and will be structured. It was really confusing at the start, but as the week neared its end it started getting easier to understand. Basically we’ve separated the application into 3 distinct parts, first is the builder where we pull raw data about a shipment from our existing databases, the next was the analyzer where we isolate and parse important and useful information about a shipment, and the final part was the calculator which calculates KPIs (KPI stands for Key performance index) that we use when generating the reports. This isn’t set in stone yet but it is what we’re going with for now. The goal is to have this project in quality assurance by early June but apparently that is flexible. The goal for the next week or so is to get a very solid design set up so we can quickly code the application and have it into QA by June. On the other side of the coin I was able to make a few changes to the COAT application with the guidance of the rest of the team and redeploy the application. I don’t believe that I will be working on this much longer however as I believe most of my time will be devoted to TPS.

My first week at Canadian Tire. The first day was spent at the main office in Toronto for orientation. Considering I worked here last summer this was a very easy day; most of the speeches were very similar or even exactly the same as the ones given last year. Only a 2 hour day to start off my 8 month term, not bad. The rest of my actual work week in Brampton went pretty smooth. At the start it was mainly reacquainting myself with the team (very few changes from last year) and also getting used to the office environment again. My team switched to a more agile style of development so I had to familiarize myself with all the new concepts and buzzwords and also get some practice working with JIRA, the online tool the team uses to keep track of all our progress. There was also the customary mandatory training videos. Not much here except for instructional videos on security and office etiquette which were pretty boring to be honest considering I watched the same ones last year, they did help me settle back in to the office environment however. On the programming side I was introduced to 2 projects; the first was a tool code named COAT that was very far into development (I believe it was at the quality assurance phase) and the other was a project named TPS, which stands for Transportation Performance Scorecard, which will apparently generate reports about our delivery performance among other things. I had the chance to see the code base for COAT which was slightly overwhelming considering how far along it was. I believe I will be spending more time on TPS and spent a large chunk of most my days in design meetings. Not a bad first week all in all, glad to be back with the same team as last year, programming and making money.