Tools and Product Features to Troubleshoot Environments

In this lesson, we’ll explore a list of design strategies, tools, and features that can help us narrow down environmental issues better.

Design strategies

Typically, one can think of a software module as being made of two parts. The first part fetches or writes data using APIs that talk to external entities, and the second part processes or collects data that is to be used for making these external calls. Designing an interface that abstracts the component that talks to the external entity is usually good. This clear distinction makes it easy to narrow down, monitor, and even test individual components. When debugging an issue, if we have narrowed down the issue to a subcomponent around a particular module, we can test the mock of the external entity’s interface and make it behave very closely to the one where a bug is seen and verify the component that talks to the external entity. This method, though it depends a lot on the design of the system, can prove to be very effective.