I had a mandate to help bring a couple of fellow QA testers up to speed on basic automated test code, fill in any knowledge gaps and answer questions.

Met with one co-worker and figured I'd start with his questions and work from there. He opened his test code and said he focused on learning 'if statements' last week but his test isn't running and just throwing errors.

Upon inspection, I realized it was a deeply nested (sometimes 10 or more conditions) single method soup that had never been run through even a syntax check. I blinked... *coughed* and spent the next few hours trying to "port the desired functionality" to a new file while he watched.