Debugging is a crucial skill for any programmer, but it can be especially challenging when you have to deal with a crisis that affects your users, clients, or stakeholders. How can you effectively lead a debugging team during a crisis and solve the problem as quickly and efficiently as possible? Here are some tips to help you manage the situation and your team.
The first thing you need to do is to assess the impact of the bug or error on your system, your users, and your business. How severe is the problem? How many users are affected? How much data or functionality is compromised? How much revenue or reputation is at risk? You need to have a clear understanding of the scope and urgency of the crisis, as well as the expectations and priorities of your stakeholders. This will help you communicate the issue, set realistic goals, and allocate resources accordingly.
You need to consider the monitoring and logging for such a purpose. Use the available tools to build efficient dashboards and automate your alerts. Use tools like NewRelic to keep an eye on your application performance and define alerts for critical errors when they exceed a specific threshold. Use something like Kibana to check your logs. And use tools like Prometheus to build dashboards off your infrastructure metrics like CPU utilization. Those will enable you to asses the impact and prioritize what to tackle first.
The next step is to assemble the right team for the task. Depending on the nature and complexity of the problem, you may need different skills, roles, and expertise on your debugging team. You may also need to coordinate with other teams or departments, such as QA, security, customer service, or marketing. You need to identify who is responsible for what, how they will communicate and collaborate, and what tools and processes they will use. You also need to establish a clear chain of command and decision-making authority, as well as a way to track and report progress.
Define the needed persons with the needed skills for each part of the problem at hand. For example, you may be a backend engineer(Knows the service side code) and a Site Reliability Engineer (Knows the infrastructure). In some other cases, you may need to have a Frontend and a Site Reliability Engineer. Put the needed people in a call or a room. They can discuss faster.
Once you have your team in place, you need to analyze the cause of the problem and identify the root source of the error. You may need to use various debugging techniques, such as logging, tracing, testing, debugging tools, or code reviews, to isolate and reproduce the bug. You may also need to gather feedback from users, clients, or other sources to understand the symptoms and effects of the problem. You need to document your findings, hypotheses, and evidence, and share them with your team and stakeholders.
Document the timeline during the incident. Try to write the actions that have been taken since the issue was reported. This will help you to create a post-mortem. In the post-mortem, you can share: - The timeline of the events. - The five WHYs analysis. - The action items which will be taken to prevent such incidents again.
After you have found the cause of the problem, you need to apply the solution that will fix it. You may need to write, modify, or delete some code, change some configuration or settings, or update some dependencies or libraries. You need to test your solution thoroughly, both locally and in a staging environment, to ensure that it works as intended and does not introduce new bugs or errors. You also need to follow the best practices and standards of your codebase, such as code formatting, commenting, version control, and documentation.
The final step is to assess the outcome of your solution and verify that it resolves the problem. You need to deploy your solution to the production environment, monitor its performance and behavior, and collect feedback from users, clients, or other sources. You need to measure the impact of your solution on your system, your users, and your business, and compare it with the baseline before the crisis. You need to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of your solution, as well as the satisfaction and trust of your stakeholders.
A debugging crisis can be a stressful and demanding situation, but it can also be a valuable learning opportunity for you and your team. You need to reflect on the experience and identify what went well, what went wrong, and what can be improved. You need to document the lessons learned, the best practices, and the action items for future reference. You also need to celebrate the achievements, recognize the contributions, and appreciate the efforts of your team and stakeholders.
Uma forma bastante comum e efetiva de aprender com essa experiência é conduzir um rito de "Post Mortem". O objetivo desse rito n?o é apontar culpados, mas encontrar os pontos que levaram ao acontecimento do problema, como foi mitigado e quais passos devem ser feitos para minimizar a chance do problema voltar a acontecer.
Another thing can be BUY YOUR TEAM MORE TIME TO ANALYZE. I remember there was a time when my team missed the SLA for a data dump due to some memory outage issue. The downstream team was asking for the dump again and again since they were also missing SLA. While the team was working on debugging (which was causing pressure due to time constraint), I spun a new cluster with slightly higher memory and reran the code, providing the output to the downstream team. That way we were able to buy time to thing of what the issue is and also resolve it properly so that it may not occur again.