Day: January 15, 2016

The release to production was delayed until early January which is really unfortunate. It wasn’t our fault this time however; the team responsible for productionalizing software wanted to focus all their energy on releasing the changes to the company website. It’s kind of disappointing that I won’t get to see the application in production, but at least I know I’ve had a huge impact on it. This week there wasn’t much to do. I spent most of my time making a command file that basically does our deployment process automatically. So what used to take 30 minutes now only takes about 2 which will be a huge help in the future when deploying changes. I can’t believe my terms are done now. The 8 months just flew by. I’ve learned so much about software development and best practices and agile development and working on large projects as a team, as well as great programming techniques like testing, debugging, and performance testing. I’m so grateful to Canadian Tire and to my manager and team for everything it was a great experience and I’m very excited to hear about how TPS turns out. 😀

We spent the beginning of the week in meetings determining what we could and could not do as far as the changes to the calculations and Insight go. We put together a much more reasonable list of changes we could make to the application, which was approved by the testers and the business. We quickly set out and made all the necessary changes required; I made some changes to the calculators while others worked on the analyzers or Insight. We were able to get all the changes done and tested before the end of Friday which was really encouraging. All medium to high severity bugs that were outstanding are now closed and UAT testing is basically complete. I was also able to finish all the ssis packages I was working on so we are basically ready for production next week.

I can’t believe it’s December. In a couple of weeks I’ll be done here and the application will be deployed. Crazy. All my changes for Insight were confirmed working this week which is good. Also Insight in general is been dramatically improved. However apparently there was a miscommunication between teams on how certain aspects of the application should work and the results we should expect. We received a sizeable list of things that the users want calculated in a way that wasn’t the way we doing it before. A lot of work was done by the business analysts and testers to confirm exactly what needs to happen, and we started having meeting to decided what we can and can’t do by the new Production deadline of December 16. I have also began working on several ssis packages that will import referential data (locations, carriers, etc) for our application.

There were a couple bugs in my changes for Insight unfortunately. Most of them were very minor and I’ve fixed them but one did require a lot of heavy lifting because the object structure wasn’t set up exactly how we thought so I needed to change it and some of the analyzer algorithms to do what we needed it to do. That will all be re-tested next week. I’m starting to really feel like an expert at this whole application which is pretty cool, everything makes way more sense than it did 4 months ago. I’ve also a crazy amount of C# that I’ve never used which is really useful. Apparently all of our unit tests were also fixed like a month ago which is awesome and really helps testing. Whenever we make a change we now have to make sure that we run all the tests and create new ones if needed. We technically should have done this before but that whole object structure issue we had back in July really messed everything up. Really good work by the other co-op student though to fix everything. Insight testing also began this week and as expected it’s full of bugs so most of the full time employees are working to fix that.

I was able to finish all my changes for the Insight upgrade. They still need to be tested that probably won’t happen until next week. Simulation is basically done finally and UAT should start next week. The process will still be similar to how simulation worked but we’re assuming there will be viewer bugs and thus less need for deployments.

This week was a lot of meetings discussing what was outstanding. Most of what we discussed was pertaining to insight and modifying TPS reporting to be ready to link with the Insight application. I took it upon myself to start readying the application to be able to communicate with Insight and changing it so it saves all the important information Insight needs to do its thing. Other than that there was more bug fixes and deployments.

Simulation is starting to take a really long time, long enough where we have to leave it running overnight when we deploy. We’re starting to make improvements to the application now that have been put off because of the testing but still need to get done for production. Other than that not much, no new bugs were reported so we’ve time to catch up with fixing all the open ones.

Not much to report again this week. More bug fixes and releases. It seems a lot of the bugs being reported have the same symptoms. This makes it really easy to track down a bug based on the symptom once you start to realize the patterns. One thing is for sure I’ve definitely learned a lot about debugging which is really useful.

The AVP in charge of our team (among many others) took everyone out to the Mandarin this week to say he appreciates the hard work which was really nice. Other than that not much happened, just more testing and repairs. We’re starting to realize the effects of having to rerun the simulation files after every deployment. It always seems that whoever has to deploy has to stay a couple hours late to monitor the files.

It was my birthday on Monday! It was also Thanksgiving which was a pretty sweet combination to be honest. We’re only a week into simulation testing and nothing really exciting has happened, just more bug fixes and deployments. My Team Lead announced that he is leaving at the end of the month which will be interesting because he’s been such an integral part of the project. I’m sort of nervous to see how everything works when he’s gone.