I've mentioned my use of Six Sigma techniques for debugging a couple of times before (5 Whys and Ishikawa diagrams) but a mention of the Six Sigma approach to end-to-end problem resolution (and process improvement) is long-overdue.
Known ...
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Back in September 2009 (that seems so long ago!) I wrote an article on problem solving using the 5 Whys technique. Some correspondents suggested that 5 Whys was a trivial/obvious technique, but they were missing the point somewhat - sometim...
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I just looked at some code I had written a few months ago. It categorized things based on a bunch of criteria. At the end of the data step I output the categories that did not fit into a definition bucket nicely:if bucket in(12,11,10,7,6,5,4) then ou...
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The SAS macro variable "inspector" is a custom task that plugs into SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3. You can use it to view the current values for all SAS macro variables that are defined within your SAS session. You can also evaluate "immediate" macro expressions in a convenient quick view window.
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R objects that reside in other R objects can require a lot of typing to access. For example, to refer to a variable x in a dataframe df, one could type df$x. This is no problem when the dataframe and variable names are short, but can become burdensom...
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I was recently introduced to the Windows 7 Problem Steps Recorder (PSR). Wow, it's a well-hidden nugget of gold in Windows! Have you ever had the task of recording the steps you took in Windows? Perhaps to describe a problem, or maybe to create so...
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Here is something to keep in mind when using the END= option on the set statement: There is no guarantee you will hit the end of file.Simple example to illustrate:data test; do i = 1 to 10; output; end;run;data _null_; set test(where=(i > 10)...
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As we get close to the end of the year, it's time to look back over the past year and think of resolutions for 2011 and beyond. One that's often on my mind relates to ways to structure my code to make it clearer to others (as well as to myself when I l...
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