A Tale of Software Development, Testing, and Demos

Public Failure and Humiliation

I delivered an SSIS Academy presentation yesterday, the first of many (I hope). You can view the recording here (free, but registration required). If you watch around the 57:30 mark, you will notice I encounter a bug in SSIS Catalog Compare around 59:15. My subsequent demo of CatCompare – the command-line interface scheduled for release around the end of the year – suffered as well.

Live Demos Fail

I enjoy presenting because I enjoy learning. I’ve learned a lot by listening to others present. I still do.

Presenters whom I respect advise against doing live demos. I understand their logic. Errors and failures are unnecessary distractions to folks who want to see the capability of a technology.

I get that.

I Wish the Real World Would Just Stop Hasslin’ Me

I like to demo real-world scenarios. Failures are real-world – especially when developing software. So I don’t feel defeated when a demo goes south.

Take Two

I continued testing today. I found and fixed the code that caused the issue yesterday. You can view the results here.

Conclusion

I’ve divorced emotion from failure. It’s difficult but necessary if one is going to treat failure like steps on the path to success. Scott Adams has interesting thoughts on failing your way to success in his book:

HowToFailAtAlmostEverythingCover

You might like working with Enterprise Data & Analytics because we succeed.

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Andy Leonard

andyleonard.blog

Christian, husband, dad, grandpa, Data Philosopher, Data Engineer, Azure Data Factory, SSIS guy, and farmer. I was cloud before cloud was cool. :{>

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