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Those Stinking Users


By Larry O'Brien
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July 1, 2007 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Perhaps the only thing worse than a slow uptake of your application is a smash hit. Users have a way of outfoxing everything, including load tests, and the imperative to respond to existing customers can absorb all the working hours of a team that is scheduled to move on to the next version. Worse, when a product is exposed to an order of magnitude more users than planned and when the product is used more intensely than anticipated, the defect list grows rapidly, potentially panicking the team into treating the symptoms, not the causes. The resulting chaos can easily derail a team, especially one new to agile processes, where “the customer is always right” and being responsive were the values that led to the success in the first place.

Not long ago, I witnessed this very problem. I was engaged to work on the requirements and architecture of The Next Phase, which didn’t seem to have a lot to do with The Current Deployment, whose two big features were a comprehensive audit trail for management and a Web-based “dashboard” that gave users a much better view of their own context. Following the principles of “You Ain’t Gonna’ Need It” and “Don’t Repeat Yourself,” the dashboard and the auditing facilities used the same messages to request information; the dashboard, of course, stripped out the huge blobs of auditing data and presented a much-compressed summary. What was not anticipated (note the use of the passive tense to avoid blame) was that the users found the historical perspective of the dashboard very valuable and configured their dashboards to retrieve not just a day or two of history, but often everything they did in the past month. Further, once the initial group of users saw The Current Deployment, the client company went from a cautious ramped deployment to “We want to give this to everyone, starting Monday.”

Wonderful, right? Well, not so much. The documents coming back to the presentation layer were huge and the response times quickly degraded. A quick look at the server’s performance monitors showed that memory was thrashing terribly—it was paging data on and off the disk continuously.




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