Experimentation: Just Try It!

I’ve now been working in tech for 25 years, and in that time I’ve developed some wisdom. One theme I’ve discovered and blogged about repeatedly over the years is profound despite its simplicity: In many cases, the best way to know whether something will work is to just try it. I’ve written numerous posts making fundamentally the same point: Want to detect if a user is online? Just try sending a request! Want to know if a new feature will result in user churn or crashes? Conduct a field trial with feature flags! Want to know how a setting or Group Policy will behave? Create a trivial test and try it out! Want to know if your app or site will work after the next browser update? Try a pre-release channel! Want to know if you’re likely to be broken in the future? Use a practical time machine to check! While I believe experimentation is usually the best approach, it’s not always practical to try things out — you might not have the time, resources, or expertise required to experiment. And…