This week was a half-week due to the 4th of July holiday.

So, I learned some tough real-world software engineering lessons this week.  I submitted the test suite I wrote last week for a code review and it turned out that a bunch of test components which I had assumed were unused and superfluous were actually being referenced by the tests for another software tool.  Whoops!  So some of the new tests that I wrote are now duplicate in functionality to the old existing code, which is a major no-no, as twice as much code means twice as much cost to maintain.  Yeah, that was a bit embarrassing…  I will be refactoring my test suite next week to fix all of that.

Lesson learned: NEVER assume a piece of code isn’t an external dependency elsewhere.

I also began studying some more performance-related concepts.  I worked my way through the book “Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics” by Brian Clifton. Google Analytics is pretty much the current industry standard for website traffic analysis and provides a wealth of data which can be very useful in creating accurate load & stress tests.

Another lesson learned: never go on vacation, lest your cubicle be Justin Biebered:

This is what happens if you use your vacation time at WotC.

That’s all for this week.  I look forward to transitioning beyond scripted web testing and into performance testing.