Sis Admin's Diary #3 - UAT-Driven Development
Most developers seem to use the terms 'Agile' and 'Scrum' interchangeably, even though they're two very different things, and I'd argue that Scrum is actually the antithesis of Agile. There are numerous criticisms I have of Scrum, and a few examples I could give from experience where projects had been killed by it over the years.
Thankfully only one project manager insists on stand-up meetings, and that's for the one project we're hoping to complete in the next week or two. He thought it a good idea to have a weekly demo of one of my applications to the UAT people. On the face of it, that does make sense, as one would expect it's a way of reassuring ourselves that we're on the right track, and he probably knows that defects are much easier to fix the earlier they're caught. What typically ends up happening, though, is several of us are bogged down trying to sort UAT-listed defects and change requests instead of working on getting the core stuff released, weekly UAT testing also means working to more immediate deadlines, which resulted in us doing the development work on the production server, and hoping we can replicate those changes to the staging environment at some later point.
How close are we to the completion? Well, I need to test whether my data loading software works with the giant JSON file I managed to acquire, and check that the output renders exactly as it should. I also need to spend a while on the long process of debugging and fixing a chain of things in one of the Logic Apps that emails data as a PDF attachment. I'm half-expecting there'll be a huge JSON-related problem to fix there also.
I did some investigating to find out why one of my Logic Apps cannot get data from an API. It turns out the request is blocked by Cloudflare. Things to look for in the response include a 403 error and a 'CF-RAY' or 'cRay' identifier. We managed to sort that problem eventually. One thing that does puzzle me is why requests from Postman aren't blocked. Maybe the firewall rules have exceptions for the Postman user agent and Postman-generated token header fields.
Also, I had my weekly chat with one of the senior engineers. One of the things he's stuck on is a problem related to Azure Data Factory and an Azure-hosted MySQL database. It appears the database server is maxing out and dropping the connections, and why that's happening is a mystery. Microsoft did upgrade sonething on its back-end server. Logging and debugging is much harder with Azure than it is for on-premise things.