Marcelo De Barros, Microsoft
Web search engines are very dynamic in nature; not only are the backend and data powering the site evolving, but the frontend is always adapting to different browsers, devices and form-factors, and experiments are often running in production. In fact, when it comes to User Experience (UX), it is likely that users are always falling into some live experiment in production: variation of colors, fonts, typography, different Java Scripts and so on. Issues can occur on the live site for very particular contexts, where a context is defined as a particular configuration of browser, market and experiment. As an example, a JavaScript error can occur on a certain page, for certain types of queries, against a certain market on a particular browser. Creating a priori monitoring for all these different contexts is not feasible.
We at the Microsoft Bing Experiences Team developed a concept of synthetic exploratory monitoring that can focus on the important features on the sites and pages, and use invariants (conditions that should always hold true, or always hold false, for specific contexts) to detect potential anomalies in the current context. We make use of stochastic models to ensure maximum relevant coverage of contexts and devices. We use the power of the Selenium testing framework to drive end-to-end automation on browsers and devices, the notion of exploratory tests based on simple finite-state machines, and a set of heuristics and invariants (text-based and image-based) that can auto-detect problems on the live site in very particular contexts.
We implemented the idea explained in this paper to monitor large-scale web sites such as Bing Search Engine where alerts are generated automatically whenever the anomaly conditions are detected. The solution is easily expandable to other sites. We envision, as future work, moving this technology to the cloud that would allow easy customization of all parameters (browsers used, definition of the finite-state machine, heuristics and invariants).
This paper explains the fundamental principles to create a stochastic monitoring model and demonstrates how to apply the principles to large-scale web sites and services. We will utilize Bing Search Engine to illustrate the techniques explained here.
Target audience: Intermediate
Marcelo De Barros, 2014 Technical Paper, Paper, Slides
