Re: Discuss changing the behaviour of append()
- Posted by gimlet Jun 18, 2014
- 3813 views
We had a classic at work today:
We had been writing
S14 for Spring FY 13/14
X14 Christmas
A14 Autumn
T14 Tax
All clear and no problems.
Then it was decided that this was not good enough because they did not sort in order.
So this is changed to:
141
142
143
144.
What happened next was unfortunate.
Two appeals at one time, one file containing records for both, the same sub-codes for both, no communication.
We had campaign codes like 143A-MAR-12 and 144A-MAR-12, not exactly distinguishable.
I failed to see that there were 2 campaigns in the list (this was unexpected - like I had never seen this before). As a result all were imported to the database as campaign 144.
During the processing (in Excel) the records within the the sub-groups with an empty column between so the database IDs no longer matched the list IDs. (Two separate files not checked off against each other).
This was not detected: no one checked as this has not happened before.
This story has some relation to efficiency, cutting corners, etc.
I'm thinking
documentation: communication,
clear coding: meaningful names,
typing: one file per campaign.
