Another guy at work needed some help solving a high priority problem. So I sketched out the design for a solution and gave it to him. The next day he asked that I review his stuff. He had written a script that did not compile. And it did not get the business rules right.Our manager told the guy to report to my office and work with me. I advised him to scrap his script. We got down to some pair programming. I first wrote out the program in all pseudo code. Then I wrote the code, filling in stubs for the functions and procedures we needed to write. We filled those in later.
Earlier that morning I had written a script to generate test data. I had also written another script to run some automated unit tests. I figured I had now provided the tools needed for my coworker to solve the problem. He called me late at night telling me the fix failed test. Now the unit tests were failing. I quickly found that the problem was due to bad test data.
Next the tried to run the tests in the production environment. The code did not run fast enough. This was somewhat expected. We wrote the script for correctness and not speed. There was no initial time for optimization. Finally I spent about an hour rewriting the script to be fast. I spent the rest of the night working with the production people to get the new script run. I hate it when I need to step in and take charge.
