Spreadsheets and the Scientific Method

As a project manager, you probably know how long it can take developers to find and fix bugs. And if you're incredibly lucky, you may have never heard "intermittent error" whispered amongst your teams. If you have a small site, you name these things "gremlins" and go back to writing code. The bigger the site, the more likely those problems are to re-appear. So what can you, as a project manager, do to help?

In this session I will teach you some basic processes for identifying intermittent issues, and doing log analysis. We'll start with simple spreadsheets, graduate to analysis tools such as ELK and Munin, and finally talk about some of the amazing investigations our team has worked on with our resident data scientist.

By the end of this session, you will be able to:

• create bit-sized chunks to investigate for intermittent problems ("the hypothesis")
• identify the advantages of the different types of profiling tools which can be used to analyse logs
• collate and report on your findings so that others can take actions

Real-world examples (and anecdotes) will be used throughout this presentation to illustrate how (and why) you should use the scientific method to help your developers tackle the hardest issue of all: the intermittent issue.