2007/03/13

On using dead chickens for problem determination

My friend Luis comes back to the office in state of shock. He has been at a client's, along with two people from two other supplier companies that will go unnamed.

They are trying to determine why an application with code from the three parties is crashing. Luis is amazed while the experts invoke the crashing code while turning over their heads a dead chicken clockwise, check the output of filemon and regmon, repeat the process turning the chicken counter-clockwise, and perform another half an hour of equally insightful tests. Based on the evidence collected while changing the chicken's turning speed, the experts conclude that's IBM's code fault and they want to rush to tell the customer about it.

Luis takes a while to digest these new problem determination techniques, and, when he is able to recover his ability to speak, suggests taking a look at the logs from Doctor Watson; the experts are amazed by the tool; the logs show that the dead-chicken-based finger pointing is very unlikely to be right.

The experts grab their huge flemon and regmon outputs, the drwtson32 logs and their dead chickens and leave. It takes us a while to get Luis back to unpuzzled mode.

1 comentario:

Anónimo dijo...

That story was so good! I had forgotten it... Explained by you is even more shocking and funny.

-Luis