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by Ben Hosking.
Original Post: Last minute coding can't squash all the bugs
Feed Title: A Funny Java Flavoured Look at the World
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Feed Description: The blog looks at using Java and programming in general as it pops up in life as a Java programmer. It will have links to interesting Java articles and resources. It will also have a lot of SCJP Java 1.5 information and links as I am currently studying
Well I have had one crazy day of programming. I came in early and left late. It was as all last minute dash coding, hectic and time going past at double the speed.
It's funny but usually when you are at work time slowly ticks by, it seems to take about three days just to reach lunch and I won't even mention the afternoon. If you have a deadline looming, it's the complete opposite, it seemed as soon as I got it was lunch time.
When you are trying to squeeze a week's worth of programming into two days it does get tricky. In this particular piece of work I was working on the back end and my manager was working on the front end which was done in flash. My code was taking a while but I had done it in a way that once I got the first bit done then the other bits should be easy to add in. We connected up the code just before lunch. A bit of ironing out with variable names and what he was expecting to receive what I was expecting to send. Success.
Then during the afternoon we added the rest of the code and as usual there were some minor bugs to iron out but it seemed to go okay.
It was only during the last part of the day that we noticed some bigger bugs. This is basically what I warned them would happen, if we don't have time to test then we are basically going to give them a problem with some bugs in. The work was a database search for postcodes. I didn't realise that there are about 6 columns to do with the number. If there isn't a number it has a name and the name has a prefix and affix. This was a project that we had done before but on an old application, so some people knew this but I didn't so I only put the number in. Earlier in the project I had said I am going to put a null in for columns which have no data, yes this was fine everyone said....Until today when now it isn't. The other major problem is I had to hard code a lot of the parameters, fine they said. This will probably be fine until I get out on the customers site tomorrow and they want to change something.
On the plus side doing things in a rush does give you something to show for your hard work and showing the customer something early does have benefits because they can tell you what they like and what they don't like and you haven't wasted too much time doing it. It's also pretty exciting working to a tight deadline (not all the time though). The only thing I am not that pleased about is having no time to test the code, there are quite a few bugs which given an extra half a day or day would be sorted.
Tomorrow is going to be a bit of magic show, a lot of slight of hand and getting the customers eyes on the other features and not to focused on the buggy new postcode search. Oh well at least I get my expenses paid.
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