Dropping the “Replay” feature
Dropping a feature is sometimes critical to improve the overall user experience of a product.
By Christophe Dujarric, on Jul 22, 2016 Sometimes, it’s better to remove some code than to add some. That can be for technical debt reasons, but it’s even more important when it’s a matter of functional debt. Technical debt is one horrifying thing for developers. But functional debt is a flaw which directly impact the user experience, and we really care about this.
We dropped the “Replay” feature, because of that. What was it? That button that appeared sometimes on a profile, which you could click on to “re-profile” the same request.
Never saw it? Well that was one of its flaws. We built it to make your life easier so that you wouldn’t need to type again the same command line, or open your browser and click on the Chrome Extension over and over. That was helpful for instance when doing several iterations on your code, to profile and compare with the previous profile.
We’ve been checking the usage of that feature across all Blackfire users, and one thing was clear: it was the least used feature of all. People tend to use a lot more the CLI, SDK, and the Builds.
Builds are actually the best replacement to Replay, especially as they cover all of its use cases, and many more. In whichever way they are started (periodically, via an integration or the API), builds automate the profiling and testing of not only page, but as many as you want to configure directly online, or via the blackfire.yml file.
Contact us if you need more details on Builds!
