It's been a while since I posted anything with content, so here goes :)

The (Dark) Art of Presenting Results

As many of you know, my job is to fix bugs :-), but the ideas described here apply to all lines of work. One of the most important phases in any problem-solving endeavor is analyzing the results that your solution provides, and presenting them in some meaningful way. Sometimes you even do that to improve your solution. In my case, I had a bug to fix: everything worked fine 72% of the time. The solution I had made that number rise to 93%.

You might say...hmm well that's about 21% improvement...which is good but not stellar...and you might be right. But this post is not about being right, but about presenting the results in a way that they get more bang for the buck so to speak :)

If instead of thinking about how we increased the "wellness" (i.e. we raised the percentage of time things work OK) we now think about how we decreased the rate the bug happens, something very interesting happens. The bug used to reproduce 100% - 72% = 28%. The fix made that drop to 100% - 93% = 7%. So far, no surprises, we still get a 21% gap. But the interesting thing is that you can say that relatively, you reduced the failure rate by 400%! Indeed, 0.28 / 0.07 = 4

Just a little something I thought it'd be interesting to share with y'all :)