Book Image

Real-World SRE

By : Pavlos Ratis, Nat Welch
Book Image

Real-World SRE

By: Pavlos Ratis, Nat Welch

Overview of this book

Real-World SRE is the go-to survival guide for the software developer in the middle of catastrophic website failure. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) has emerged on the frontline as businesses strive to maximize uptime. This book is a step-by-step framework to follow when your website is down and the countdown is on to fix it. Nat Welch has battle-hardened experience in reliability engineering at some of the biggest outage-sensitive companies on the internet. Arm yourself with his tried-and-tested methods for monitoring modern web services, setting up alerts, and evaluating your incident response. Real-World SRE goes beyond just reacting to disaster—uncover the tools and strategies needed to safely test and release software, plan for long-term growth, and foresee future bottlenecks. Real-World SRE gives you the capability to set up your own robust plan of action to see you through a company-wide website crisis. The final chapter of Real-World SRE is dedicated to acing SRE interviews, either in getting a first job or a valued promotion.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Real-World SRE
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

User testing


User testing is the act of working with users to determine whether certain experiences are optimal (or at least good) and if they are what the user actually wants to do. These are often called user interviews. The idea is that you ask a user questions to see how they do, or would, interact with a piece of software. To create a user test, you need to come up with an experience that you want to investigate, come up with questions and tests, and find people to test.

In most of my examples, I am talking about software that is already built. Just remember throughout this chapter that you can do user testing with paper diagrams or frontends that have buttons that don't do anything, or even using a slide deck. The more ephemeral the thing your users are interacting with, though, the more you need to set up the test to explain what is going on.

You can use these tests to design user stories. User stories are a description of a type of action a user will take. They often combine three...