Updating a pair of tools

This week I am checking in some changes I am making to a pair of tools I use regularly.

I wish the tools had some great names, but they don't, so please bear with some short descriptions. We have a server we use to hold all sorts of debugging data from various automation runs or manual tests - memory dumps, log files, screenshots, etc… Sometimes we get duplicate reports of bugs, especially from automation, and those files can be safely deleted once we have enough data to proceed. I have a simple tool that looks through the files and removes the ones we do not need. Maybe it is not obvious, but the next step with this tool is to move the logic to the automation system and not gather the data in the first place. That will save some time and disk space, but for right now I would rather have too much data than not enough. A work item to move that logic does exist, though.

The second tool is a simple parser that looks through changes we make to OneNote and gives me a report of how much change there is total. Change here looks at the code the developers submit and gives me a total of new lines added, previous lines deleted and number of lines changed. One of the tools I have generates this report, but I needed a tool to look through that output and give me the total. Oddly, depending on how a developer submits changes, this total is sometimes computed, but not always. This change is in code review right now and I need to change some variable names to make them more descriptive. There is nothing special about this tool. It is just simple string manipulations but it proved handy at the end of last year and I do not want to write it again. I've learned to check code into the repository.

Once I get these changes done, it is on to another week of testing OneNote.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John