Wednesday 8th April

‎09-04-2009

Happy Wednesday everyone. I've got a much more populated EOD for you today. I hope you enjoy it! First up, Jake from the CSC

G' afternoon. I found a great little game yesterday Found it after looking back at some of the older community news, but what I was really impressed with was the accompanying making of video I was always rubbish at Art when in school, but watching that, it's made me want to try and build... something. Anyhow, we've been fielding our usual calls flows today, and our top five is:

Router configs – Netgear, Linksys, Belkin and our favourite the Thomson have all needed configuring today.

House moves – As it can take a bit of time to complete a house move, particularly when we're waiting on a line being activated before the broadband provision can be placed, this'll generate a few calls. Also regarding BT SIM provides, we've come across not finding this too straight forward, (it's where you port your broadband across to a new property with your number) so I'm posting this link, 'cos it's really handy

Faults updates – No synchronisation or no authentication means absolutely no Internet, so we'll often get calls for updates.

Faults reporting – Where a customer seems to have a fault, we'll run through some diagnostics with them before raising as a Fault

Email setups/queries – Either new mail accounts need setting up in mail clients, or customer's need a hand adding additional mailboxes.

It's beautifully sunny outside, and it looks like we're prepping for Easter as there's loads of eggs appearing dotted around the CSC, so maybe working Easter'll be have some good bonuses! Bye for now.

Rys from Development

By far and away the most interesting thing that happened in Dev today was the discussion between a few of us about the pros and cons of directly unit testing a class's private logic. The argument for it centred around being able to explicitly test for correctness in a directed fashion, mostly to service the aim of being able to test all internal branches. The arguments against it were more numerous, and were collected under the umbrella of only testing a unit's public interfaces. Given sufficient tests of the public interfaces, code coverage should get the same attention as directed private testing. That's just a fact. Given that, only testing public interfaces mean you don't break OOP, and you're free to refactor the internal implementations of logic without rewriting your tests, or your tests failing. That's the whole point of the endeavour, really. If you find yourself getting poor branch coverage when you run your tests, the uncovered code is either dead, or your tests aren't numerous enough. Of course that assumes your tests are perfect, but so they should be. Oh, and we also wrote some code and stuff.

Next, James from the Web Dev Team

Lots of activity in the team today with people working on various tasks including the new Home Phone product refresh project, various general problem fixes, attending meetings, and easy retention stuff. There has also been a strong debate on the subject of cold food, or to be more specific, cold food that was once hot, and whether it should be eaten. Most of us agree that cold pizza and other related products are fine cold and can actually improve in flavour as a result. However, Phil is firmly against this idea and has made his feelings very clear. Sam and I enjoyed arguing with him and made sure we got our point across also, accusing him of being nesh. What do you think? Cold pizza etc? Good for breakfast? In other news we have temporarily moved our weekly 'Cake Friday' session from Friday to Thursday this week to create.....'Cake Thursday'. This is to allow for the Good Friday holiday which otherwise would have prevented us from enjoying our weekly dose of cakey goodness.

Finally Catherine from QA

We've all been enjoying the nice weather today. Hopefully, we'll get a chance to sit out in it a bit this evening.... However, before then there's still half an hour to go. So what have we been up to? Just to spice things up, I shall report on it in the style of a terrible fantasy film. Gavin's been conjuring eldritch magics (okay, working on a project related to discounts) which hasn't been disturbing his deskmate Matt 2, who has been battling orcs (otherwise known as problems). Fortunately, the orc battling seems not to have affected Gary's concentration, as he's spent the day grappling with, not a ridiculously overmuscled hero, but our staging platform. Paul has been riding to a nearby village to collect the bounty on a feared warlord (okay, working on Partner with Rys again). Next we have Pete, who has picked his role as 'cave dwelling demon'. Glowing eyes come as standard. Apparently, cave demons spend the day doing 'bits and bobs'. That just leaves me, and the role of inevitable female character. Don't fancy being a princess, so I'll be a plucky warrior instead. I've been writing a testplan, reviewing a testplan and listening to lots of loud Finnish metal. As usual. Now, where did I put my axe?

Now I need to dash as I've got to go and run 7k. Yeah, not climbing today!