Reflection over the past year

The past year has been an interesting journey for me. After many years of searching I finally found what I want to do with my career. I have fallen in love with software development and I like to think I am good at it. Software is more than just writing code, it is oh so much more. Between the planning, creating, testing, deploying and on going support it can be a bit hectic. I started my journey as the end user, then moved to support. I am now testing and writing tools and small applications.

I have learned so much in the past year but the biggest thing I have learned thus far is that I have so much more to learn. I have a passion for learning so this is perfect. This will keep me hungry for more while my company benefits from the tools and knowledge I gain during this never ending quest for knowledge.

Given my path I bring a unique perspective to software design. Through my end user and support years I have come to learn what bothers users the most and also what they like. This has led me to focus on user interaction and methodology to provide users the best possible interaction with the software. I find that many times developers tend to think about the end user but only when it's convenient. When times are tough and code has to be churned out to meet deadlines - the user is usually the last person considered in terms of UI design and interaction. This is a practice the software community as a whole needs to change.

I am very lucky to have the opportunity to work with such a great team. There are many great people on my team from Support to QA to Development. Each person genuinely cares about the product and we all strive to make it better. We also have management buy in for most if not all of the things we do (methodologies, etc). This environment is rich with knowledge from MANY experienced developers and I get as much information from them as possible. I love sharing ideas and thoughts to help build my "arsenal" of tools.

Current Focus

While my ultimate goal is full time software development I am still in quality assurance and have learned many new techniques for testing software. The biggest concept I have taken away thus far is automation. Nothing beats end to end automation. From building the code to deploying to setting up sample data to installing and then ultimately running automated tests. Nothing is more comforting than walking in to the office in the morning to a collection of GREEN tests.

I have a long road ahead of me but I have the desire, the tools, and the team around me to make this journey.

I'm so excited......

Data Comparison Tool

In the course of my job I have to validate numerous amounts of data. We have many processes that transfer data between databases to provide flexibility for our clients. In doing so we must support MS Access,MS SQL, and Oracle. Due to the complex nature of this task and the differences in how these database engines perform - it is very difficult to ensure they are all acting the same. So I have identified the problem - and developed a custom solution for it.

The outcome of this is a custom application that uses our existing DAL to compare two databases (regardless of platform). Some of the logic from this tool was based on an existing tool we had to compare single queries.

Setup:

1 Solution, 3 projects, and NUnit.

I wrote the main class as a DLL that can be used with a form, console, or integrated into an existing application. To test this - I used NUnit. This turned out to be the best method. With the console output available in NUnit and this being primarily a testing tool - I left the other options for later and just use NUnit to run my tests. I love it when I see green!!!

How it works

First it gets a list of tables from each database and compares them
Then it compares the rows counts for each table
If that passes, then it compares the row data. This is the tricky part. Since Access, SQL, and Oracle all handle identity inserts differently, it's hard to just sort on ID. To handle this I sort and attempt a compare on each column (in a data table in memory) for each table. I then walk through each data row and compare the contents. There are some fall back checks to handle other differences such as how numbers and bits are handled between the platforms.

In the end - I can move data from one platform to another, perform the same functions in each database, and then compare the databases very quickly with high confidence.

For a database with 300 plus tables I can run a complete test in under a minute with the databases in the same office.

Time Saved:

Before App - 30 minutes per test with less than 50 percent coverage
With App - 1 to 2 minutes per test with 100 percent coverage.

Horraaayyyy for automation!!!!