How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 6. When You Can’t Look at It

It makes sense: go where the symptom is, see what the user sees. But what if you can’t? What if Nancy isn’t two miles away but two hundred? What if your users are speckled across 30+ time zones? Then what? There are many answers. Here are a few:

Screen sharing

If we’d had Zoom in 1994 (and also, you know, laptops), I could have solved Nancy’s problem without a visit. Zoom would have been enough. The COVID-19 pandemic has proven that, often, Zoom is enough.

Telemetry

If you really want to know what people all over the world are feeling when they’re using your software, then measure and record the experiences those people are having. Measure and record things like:

• What is the name of the feature being measured?

• When did the execution of the feature begin?

• When did the execution end?

• Who executed it?

• Where did the execution take place?

• How much work did the execution do?

• What is the return status of the execution?

Then, when someone has a miserable experience, it’ll show up in your data, where you can look at it from the symptom perspective. And when you fix it, that will show up in your data. Application features that record such information make an application more observable.

Simulations

Set up application access that will allow you to simulate the experiences your users are having with your system. You can, for example, artificially impair your network connection to better simulate how that user who is 3,000 miles away ...