Week 4 – Choices goes live once more!

Skills demonstrated
– Unit testing
– Manual testing
– Bash scripting
– User Consultation
– Crazy Golf

My hope to have a choices free week was delusional. Choices had to go live last week which meant – more testing.

These tests were different to my usual unit testing, these were full system tests. Usually a developer would use a program called selenium to test a system as a whole. This program simulates keystrokes and mouse input; it can be creepy to witness or so I hear. I wouldn’t know though, there was not time to implement selenium tests. Instead I spent Monday, Tuesday and part of Wednesday doing the tests by hand. Most likely, I only spent a few hours doing the tests. It took two-point-five days of my time to fix the endless torrent of errors. Who would’ve thought that an innocent action such as opening a form can blow up in my face? I accept that none of the allocation controllers worked first time, they are magical. But opening a form? That is just unfair. As is the way with choices.

Having managed to corral choices into its holding pen once more we celebrated with a round of TIDT golf. I didn’t want to show up my colleagues too much, so I kept it close and managed to pull away with a 4-point lead. We will return for the last 9 holes; the suspense is killing me.

Next on the agenda was Docpot and its migration. Docpot is a vestigial file-share which needs operating on. It’s only used by a handful of ECS staff and it’s my job to merge the remnants into a newer preexisting share. The implementation of this is simple enough, keeping the users of Docpot happy is a tricky one. By using some shell scripting magic, I was able to list all the files modified this year with who modified them. Then more shell wizardry to convert their names into emails to copy them into outlook. You can see where this is going. It turns out that it was only one directory which needs preserving. More developments on Docpot in next week’s blog post.

I’m now a third of the way through my internship. Having made it this far I’m sure that I’ve enjoyed every day so far, despite the sheer difficulty curve. I curse more at my work monitor than i do at a game of rocket league. But I’ve learnt more in these four weeks than any other four weeks in a long time.