Restless Hearts

Chapter 7 - Tough Training

Author's note: I know this chapter  will make your nose bleed! Please bear with me! :) I should at least include bits and piece of IT-related in this story :) For those who understands the coding procedures, Sorry if I didn't give so much justice to the problems, I tried to make it look as simple as possible for the other readers. :)

Chapter 7 - Tough Training

Two weeks have passed and it has been a daily routine since then. We all had transferred to the L2-tech building. Me, Liz, James and Josh were on the 19th floor while Joan and Henry were on the 20th where Lance and Rachelle lives too.

We go together every lunch. Rach had joined us because of Joan, but I really think its because of Henry. Since Lance is always with his sister, he became part of the group too.

The training was harder than I expected especially the lead trainer who we all call as Mr. Dom. He's a tyrant! He was demanding and very very strict especially when it comes to hands-on exercises.

On the last part of the training, he gave us one software full of errors. That was what to be considered as our final exam. We were all given the same software to debug however, each of us has a unique error to solve. Once we have resolved the errors, we need to merge all our solutions and the final software should still work with the functions still working properly.

There would be a minus if he found a new defect that was a cause of our code modification so we need to be very careful not to affect other areas. It is like working as a team. We need to know who is modifying what.

"This is so damn difficult!" I exclaimed.

"Have you found the cause of your defect already?" James asked me.

Oh, James and I have been very close eversince. He's cool except for the fact that he loves eating, there's nothing wrong I can think about him at all. He's handsome and always makes me laugh.

"Maybe. But I'm not yet sure. I think its because of this.." i pointed on the part of the code I was analyzing since yesterday.

James looked at it in my PC "That's the formmula of getting the value of this variable. And this variable is the cause of my defect."

"What?! So you mean to say, I've found the cause of your defect?" I asked him.

"Yup! Actually I was going to tell you that the cause of my defect was part of your code."

"Great. Now you can already solve yours. But still, when I corrected the formula, my defect still occurs! I've been thinking about this since yesterday. I think I even dreamed about this!" I said frowning at James.

"Hey, cheer up! Its not that bad. You'll be able to find your cause."

"Your defect spans through mine." Henry said.

Henry was seated beside me and James at my back. Joan was seated beside James and Liz at her back and of course, Josh was seated beside Liz.

"What do you mean by that?" I asked Henry.

"Well, you see, I've already solved mine, but there seems to be a defect around here.." He pointed on his PC.

I looked at his code and checked it.

"This variable," He pointed. "was used in this function. However, when the function used it, sometimes it returns the correct number when James' correct formula was used, but most of the time, it returns an error." he explained.

I went back to my PC and traced where the variable came from.

When I found it, I was relieved!

"Oh! Now I get it! The initialization of the variable was incorrect! The variable was initialized to be an integer. The computation was incorrect because the decimal places should be considered! The reason why sometimes the correct number was returned was because if the result of Jame's correct formula is a whole number, the error does not occur." I looked at Henry beside me.

"That would probably be the cause of your defect." Henry just shrugged and returned to test his solution.

I tried changing the initialization of the variable we were talking about.

Compile. Build. Run. No errors!

"That's it! Problem solved! Oh, thank you Henry! Thank you so so much!" I looked at him and smiled.

He didnt looked at me, just waved his hands to say welcome or was it to say keep quiet. Whatever it was, Im glad I was able to find the cause. It was nearly end of the day and this is the last day of our debugging. Tomorrow, Wednesday, we should be merging our solutions.

"I must admit," Josh said from the back. "This software is really tricky. The errors were caused by simple anomalies but they are hard to find."

"It seems the three of you had had a hard time finding your cause when they are actually just small miscalculations and incorrect formulas." Liz added.

"How about you Liz, Have you found your cause already?" I asked Her.

"Yup. Mine's easy. Its just an incorrect error handling that's why the error message did not apear. I've also added some lacking error messages since there are some errors which were not catched by some of the codes." She assured me.

"Oh, lucky you. How bout your's Joan? Do you need any help?" I asked wondering if Joan was lucky as well.

"Its okay now Val, My defect spans through Josh's code but we were able to solve his and my defect too. We are just testing our modifications for side effects." She smiled at me.

It seems that our defects were connected to each other. This must be Mr. Dom's idea. I looked at Mr. Dom on the far end of the room. He was looking at his PC too. I bet he's listening in our discussion but pretending he's busy doing something else.

Well then I just need to test more my modifications. If he stumbles upon a defect which my mods have caused, Im definitely dead!

I'm glad though that all of us were finished finding and solving our defects. We just need to make sure that they were right.

We spent the whole afternoon testing and checking for side effects. All of us were going to each and other's work stations because at some point, we stumble upon a new defect which was supposed to be working properly on the system.

It turns out that during our negative testing, Liz's error messages should be displayed but it wasn't. We found out that it was because of her mods.

We all went to Liz's PC and asked her how she managed to solve her defect and how to access her additional error handlings. She explained to us on how her mods changed the error messages that should be displayed.

After knowing how to access the error messages she created, all of us incorporated it in our codes.

Compile. No errors.

Build. No errors.

Run. No errors!

Whew! at last we all finished our testing by the end of the day. It was exhausting! But it felt great working with my batch. This was the first time we worked together as one team. I say, we did a pretty good job on it!

I am so proud of us six! It wasn't at all boring. Even though I had a hard time debugging with myself since yesterday, it turned out that little help from friends could solve each of our problems!

Nice teamwork! yehey!