The power of questioning and observation
Just another day I was involved in analyzing the performance of an online banking application. There were two set of transactions. One set was lightweight for mobile users and another heavy one, as it was for inhouse desktop users. Naturally latter was experiencing higher response times and where team was tending to focus on. I do like to start by defining the problem correctly as it saves much time. The objective of test was infrastructure evaluation. Higher response time for a set of transaction was immaterial. What was required for our evaluation was consistent response times and throughput that enabled our infrastructure evaluation exercise. I did a quick pattern evaluation and found that heavy and light transactions were getting equally impacted by oscillations. Thus we had to focus our energy more on identifying the source of oscillation. In crisis it is easy enough to get swayed and target the obvious or the low hanging fruits, which does nothing to get us closer to en...