Author: way0utwest

When Work Isn’t Done

Software development can be a challenge for each of us with lots of demands and the need to ensure your code solves a problem correctly, efficiently, and completely. Juggling the workload by yourself is one thing, but add in a team of developers, and the complexity quickly grows.

The real world is chaotic and despite the best efforts of project managers and scrum masters, our software development life cycle doesn’t always proceed smoothly. I wonder how many of you run into this situation and how you deal with it.

Developer 1 gets a piece of work, let’s call this A. They complete this and send it to the QA team. Somewhere during this process, Developer 2 get’s a different piece of work (B) and writes code. They send this to QA before A is completely tested.

Now, Developer 1 finds a mistake. Something doesn’t work or they realize their solution is incomplete. QA is A + B, but A doesn’t work and needs revision. B passes testing and needs to be deployed. If your codebase and QA have both A and B in them, how do you strip out A or B and ensure B is deployed to production but A isn’t?

If this is C# or Java, you might have one solution, even if both changes are in the same class. If this is database code, you might have a different set of issues to deal with.

Really, the question is can you reorder work in your deployment process? I find many customers don’t consider this when they are evaluating their software pipeline. They somehow assume if code gets to QA that it’s good, which is nicely optimistic but not realistic. At some point, we’ll deploy code to QA that doesn’t work. The more developers we have, the more likely this is, and the more demands on our time, the more likely we need to reorder work and release one thing but not another.

As a DB developer and DBA in a company 20 years ago, I built a process and forced us to reset the QA environment and redeploy B only (using a branch of code that stripped out A) for re-testing. This ensured that we tested what was going to be deployed. However, I find a lot of organizations can’t do this or don’t want to. They want to hope that a human and either extract all of B or strip out all of A and release partially tested code without issues.

I find that to be a poor idea. In this era of regular staff changes, staff of varying quality, and the high complexity of software, this is asking for mistakes. With cheap hardware, virtualization, and the ability to provision copies of environments, we ought to do better.

How do you handle this today? Depend on humans to not make mistakes? Hope for the best? Or follow a repeatable, reliable process that accounts for inexperience and human error?

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

November 3, 2023
A New Word: Zielschmerz

zielschmerz – n. the dread of pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrerium of hopes and delusions that you started up in kindergarten and kept selaed as long as you could.

I don’t know I have any lifelong dreams, much less zielschmerz. I used to want to play professional sports, but that lifelong dream died a long time ago when I realized pursuing it wasn’t realistic.

I have enjoyed life and worked to grow my career, skills, and enjoyment in different ways. However, I am more a take things are they come and constantly re-evaluate what I want and need more than having a dream.

However, you can pursue a lifelong dream, which might not include being tested on the savannahs, but it might be tested in the real world. My wife changed careers to work with horses, taking a leap that she could actually earn enough to have that be a viable career. It’s been nearly 12 years now and she’s made it a success, though I know she had a lot of trepidation and anxiety in making the leap and growing her business.

Hopefully there is no more zielschmerz these days for her.

From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

November 3, 2023

Game Night at the PASS Summit

Games Night is back at the Summit, this time on Wednesday night in a large space for 200 people plus to enjoy some fun with friends and colleagues. This is special to me as Andy Warren and I organized and hosted the first one, and since then it’s been an event at a few of the Summits. Now it’s the main event Wednesday after the Exhibition Hall party.

Bring a game, or come learn a new one. Be sure to add this to your schedule and spread the word. The more people, the more fun we’ll have.

Hope to see you there.

Update: I have a list of games:

7 Wonders

Apples to Apples

Brain Games

Carcassone

Catan

Catan extension pack

Chess

Clue

Codenames

Dominion

Dominoes

Exploding Kittens

Fluxx

Generic card decks

Jenga

Dominoes Mexican Train

Rummikub/Rummy Cube

Mile Borne

Monopoly

Munchkin

Pandemic

Pay Day

Phase 10

Risk

Scrabble

Sequence

Stratego

Taboo

Ticket to Ride

Trivial Pursuit

Uno

November 2, 2023

Finding Object Dependencies in SQL Doc
I had a customer recently ask if they could find out which objects are dependent on others using SQL Doc. This post shows how to do that.

Using SQL Doc

In the SQL Doc application, you can dive down into the various objects in your database. As I’ve shown below, I navigated on the left side down to a specific object.

This gives me the basics of this object, but I can scroll down and see more. The lower part below the script shows what this object depends on (Uses) and what other objects depend this one (Used By). In this case, this object depends on dbo.ErrorLog and dbo.uspPrintError.

The reverse of this can be seen in these objects. If I look at dbo.ErrorLog, then I see this proc (dbo.uspLogError) listed.

This is really a preview of documentation, not the docs themselves. While you can edit the MS_Description at the top, this isn’t the tool I’d expect most users to use. Instead, you ought to click Generate documentation at the top and choose the type you need.

Or better yet, use the command line and ensure this is regenerated after every release.

Searching the Documentation

Once the documentation is generated, it’s in static text files. These might be Word or some other format, but they are files in your machine.

If you want to search something, then you would use that search facility. A few examples below:

Word

In Word, as you can see, if I hit CTRL+F, I can search for something, like Error. That gives me a lot of results.

Not the easiest thing to search, but seeing this results in the TOC let’s me scroll down to jump to a page.

PDF

If I generate a PDF, this often renders in some application. For example, by default, this opens in a browser for me. If I want to search for “error”, I can again, CTRL+F and enter the term.

HTML

The HTML docs open in a browser, but they’re not directly searchable. There isn’t a place to click search.

If I use CTRL+F, it doesn’t work because the docs for each object are in separate files.

However, I can do some searching in the files if I use something like Visual Studio code to open the entire folder. It’s not the prettiest search, but it works.

Recommendations

I’d recommend you do two things.
1. Ensure that this is regenerated automatically with every deployment. Either to QA or prod, your choice. Depends on how your developers use docs.
2. Pic a searchable format, either Word or PDF.
SQL Doc is one of those utilities that can help a team share information, especially to report writers or others that might need to understand what fields are available and what they are used for, but don’t know the databases that well.

One thing to think about is a layer of abstraction for non technical people where you only generate docs for views that have well named columns for people to use in reports.
November 1, 2023