The meeting started out and it was just Eric and I. Part way through Wayne joined and then Cory joined after that. The goal of the meeting was to talk about and discuss the sales tax aggregate project and do some light debugging. Eric and I were going over project life cycles and talking about options for dev or development/testing servers. If we were to do that, we would like to give the developers full access to the underlying database as full database admin levels (grants and permissions).

We talked about the process of refactoring code and getting rid of some things and adding other things. It takes time but we are making progress. One of the recent things that Eric was working on was refactoring the submit cart page. We removed all of the hard stops and refactored the code to handle any number of errors without halting progress on other functions or method calls. That will help with automated testing (later on).

While it was just Eric and I on the meeting, we were also talking about the need to be able to see the full database as an admin user, not just a read only SQL prompt (simple look-ups). We need the full access to the backend database. That would really help with debugging and making sure that things are good to go for production.

Wayne joined the meeting and brought up the live database. Eric and Wayne were doing test queries and looking at stored procedures and other SQL stuff. As a side note, we were looking at tons of dates inside the system. They are very important but play at different levels. We were looking at created dates (when it was created), actual dates (when it shows up on reports and such), and last modified dates (if and when it was changed or altered). Each date plays a different role, but they are all important in the grand scheme of things. Along with that, we were going over processes and which ones run first, second, conditional, etc. Lots of backend logic.

It was fun to watch and chime in here and there as Wayne and Eric were getting pretty deep into the processes and procedures. Cory joined us and we ended up having her use the frontend web app (user interface) and Wayne and Eric checking code and actual data on the backend. It was pretty cool to see and watch them all work.

One thing of note was a redo or re-flush type option. Basically, Eric had coded in a special value that if passed in would reset the whole process and/or procedure. The end goal is not a good number (whatever that is). The real goal is a solid process and good error handling (repeatable and solid logic). That produces good numbers.