In the Additive Manufacturing & 3D Printing world, a “torture test” is often used to test the limits and capabilities of a 3D printer. There are many different designs out there, but they all aim to capture just how capable is the automated machine. For filament based printers (FFF/FDM), this involves testing bridging, overhangs, dimensional accuracy and tolerances along the x, y, and z axis. Many simple shapes are a easy to print (if printed very slowly), even for the worst printers, so torture tests are a critical tool to tell how good a printer is (at scale). With a 10-fold price difference from the most basic to the most capable printers, these tests are really important to help customers make informed purchasing decisions.
It is very much the same in the SAS modernization world. By cherry picking SAS code that’s easy to migrate using manual or semi-manual efforts, vendors can often look far more capable than they actually are. SAS code can both be extremely easy (e.g. just cut-and-paste) or outrageously hard to migrate manually. Amateurs will almost always try to bucket SAS code into low/medium/high complexity, and focus on the low complexity first. That way, at least they get in the door with a contract, and hope to figure out the rest as they go. These vendors rely on clients irrational sunk cost fallacies to keep going, with clients hoping they will ultimately deliver. Of course, as we see time and time again, hope is a rather poor strategy.
Doing the easy stuff is important for sure, but what always separates the amateurs from the pro’s is how they handle the hard stuff (and how long it takes). Amateurs will often use phrases like “we have an accelerator”, which is code for “we don’t have the faintest idea of what we’re doing”. What good is it to know that a vendor can handle 40% of your code migration, if they have no idea how to deal with the other 60%? What if even in that 40% they do handle, it takes forever and the code is such a complete mess as to be outright unmaintainable? I might want to know that, before I hang my hopes on them.
WiseWithData is proud to offer up the World’s first and only SAS Migration torture test. Captured within this torture test, are many real world SAS code examples our experts curated and know to be tricky for amateurs. Go ahead, hand this to the competition, we want you to torture them. Call it a cruel form of entertainment, you get to watch how long it takes them, and what the output looks like, if they don’t run away screaming first. When they are done wincing in pain, we’ll show you how the pro’s do it with ease using SPROCKET automation.
Get your free copy today – hello@wisewithdata.com