I’m not sure, but one of the techniques that seems most salient to me is breadth-first search. Partly this is to hold off on proposing solutions. Take just a little bit longer to look at the problem and gather data before generating hypotheses. The second part is to find cheap tests to disprove your hypotheses instead of going farther down the path that an early hypothesis leads. Folks who use depth-first search, building up a large tree of hypotheses first or going down a long path of possible tests and fixes, seem more likely to get stuck.
I also really like troubleshooting out loud with colleagues who aren’t afraid to contradict each other. Generating lots of hypotheses and quickly disconfirming most of them can quickly narrow down on the problem. “Okay, maybe the cause is a bad data push. But if that were so, it would be on all the servers, not just the ones in New York, because the data push logs say the push succeeded everywhere. But the problem’s just in New York. So it’s not the data push.”
How’d you get to be this way?
I’m not sure, but one of the techniques that seems most salient to me is breadth-first search. Partly this is to hold off on proposing solutions. Take just a little bit longer to look at the problem and gather data before generating hypotheses. The second part is to find cheap tests to disprove your hypotheses instead of going farther down the path that an early hypothesis leads. Folks who use depth-first search, building up a large tree of hypotheses first or going down a long path of possible tests and fixes, seem more likely to get stuck.
I also really like troubleshooting out loud with colleagues who aren’t afraid to contradict each other. Generating lots of hypotheses and quickly disconfirming most of them can quickly narrow down on the problem. “Okay, maybe the cause is a bad data push. But if that were so, it would be on all the servers, not just the ones in New York, because the data push logs say the push succeeded everywhere. But the problem’s just in New York. So it’s not the data push.”
Thanks!