2016-02-17

“All over New York City, there is a woman in various states of undress, so baked into architecture that we barely even notice her. In the public library, she leans against a white horse; at the intersection of 59th and 5th, she perches atop a fountain; on 107th and Broadway, she reclines on a bed; and on top of the Manhattan Municipal Building she stands tall, this time cast in gold.”

“We built Scientist to fill in that missing piece and help test the production data and behavior to ensure correctness. It works by creating a lightweight abstraction called an experiment around the code that is to be replaced. The original code — the control — is delegated to by the experiment abstraction, and its result is returned by the experiment. The rewritten code is added as a candidate to be tried by the experiment at execution time. When the experiment is called at runtime, both code paths are run (with the order randomized to avoid ordering issues). The results of both the control and candidate are compared and, if there are any differences in that comparison, those are recorded. The duration of execution for both code blocks is also recorded. Then the result of the control code is returned from the experiment.”

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