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 end goal. 'Why' is a word that has largely slipped out of adult vocabulary for reasons such as perceived impoliteness or ensuing ego conflicts. Still it is necessary to observe and understand.
The healthcare world is full of low hanging fruits- insurance administration cost, lack of focus on preventive medicine, lack of incentive for maintaining good health, wrong payment incentive for providers etc. All legitimate thoughts and self- evident. The solutions based on these premises are not. So if we are building healthy practices and enriching patients in a provider's catchment area to become more healthy, what will the hospitals do with all their spare capacity? Do they have flexible costbase capacity to adjust expense according to patient load that they serve? We might spend many years perfecting preventive medicine practice to find all it did was some cost shifting, from relatively healthier patient who benefited from it to those were too much down the lane to benefit from it. That just negates what insurance is trying to achieve, lowering the overall cost by spreading it across healthy segment.
In performance engineering world, I see similar trends. There are tuning efforts that can be treated as axiomatic and self evident truths. Yet the solution based on that is self defeating or misleading. There are easier approaches, such as paying attention to performance test results- observing inflection points and events that occur around it. That itself reveals a lot of insightful information and can take us to the source of bottlenck as quickly as, say as a fancy profiling tool.
Questioning, I believe is the best way to formulate the right question and problem statement. Observation is an underrated, but powerful tool for solving many problems.
The healthcare world is full of low hanging fruits- insurance administration cost, lack of focus on preventive medicine, lack of incentive for maintaining good health, wrong payment incentive for providers etc. All legitimate thoughts and self- evident. The solutions based on these premises are not. So if we are building healthy practices and enriching patients in a provider's catchment area to become more healthy, what will the hospitals do with all their spare capacity? Do they have flexible costbase capacity to adjust expense according to patient load that they serve? We might spend many years perfecting preventive medicine practice to find all it did was some cost shifting, from relatively healthier patient who benefited from it to those were too much down the lane to benefit from it. That just negates what insurance is trying to achieve, lowering the overall cost by spreading it across healthy segment.
In performance engineering world, I see similar trends. There are tuning efforts that can be treated as axiomatic and self evident truths. Yet the solution based on that is self defeating or misleading. There are easier approaches, such as paying attention to performance test results- observing inflection points and events that occur around it. That itself reveals a lot of insightful information and can take us to the source of bottlenck as quickly as, say as a fancy profiling tool.
Questioning, I believe is the best way to formulate the right question and problem statement. Observation is an underrated, but powerful tool for solving many problems.
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