Get the Numbers Right

I travel a lot for business and personal reasons. I’ve used TripIt (owned by Concur) for several years to plan and manage my trips.

It’s a  great tool, can’t image living without it.

Today TriptIt sent me a lovely graphic email summarizing my 2017 travel.  The design was  a very fashionable  card layout with share-to-social links.

Pretty cool, but for one problem.  It’s not my data.

Yes, those are definitely not my travel stats.

When I teach Qlik application development, a common  question raised by students or other newcomers is: “What’s the most important skill to master?  Scripting?  Expression writing?  SQL? Pre-attentive attributes? Color rules?”

My answer is always the same: “First, get the numbers right.  Second, keep the numbers right”.

It doesn’t matter how it looks or how fast it calculates if the results are wrong.

Join me at the Masters Summit for Qlik in Prague 3-5 April where in addition to a full range of Qlik Dev topics, we’ll be discussing automating quality.  I’ll be demonstrating tools to automate dashboard validation and continuous quality monitoring.

-Rob

BTW I emailed the TripIt folks about the error, they’ve promised to look into it.  

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One thought on “Get the Numbers Right”

  1. Totally agree! Data Validation and Testing often get insufficient attention in a tight project as it is not the “cool & sexy” work.

    Great post!

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