A key part of business is the drive for continual improvement, to always do better. “Better” can mean different things to different organizations. It could be about offering better products, better services, or the same product or service for a better price or any number of things. Fundamentally, to be “better” requires ongoing analysis of the current state and comparison to the previous or next one. It sounds straightforward: you just need data and the means to analyze it.
When I first started my role as an analytics engineer, I was tasked with rewriting a bunch of data models that were written in the past by contractors. These models were taking over 24 hours to run and often failed to run at all. They were poorly thought out and contained a bunch of “quick fix” code rather than being designed with the entire flow of the model in mind.
In a world where technological advances are made on a daily basis, software products are often affected by routine updates. While updating software is necessary for all businesses, it can introduce a slew of bugs into applications and websites. If these software bugs are not thoroughly tested, validated, and fixed, they could end up costing the company a lot of money in production. User interface (UI) and visual bugs in software products are often disregarded due to the focus on functional testing.
