Suppose that you've rolled out your application and people are using it. Then the support desk starts getting calls about a certain problem. Maybe your boss is getting an earful at meetings about sluggish performance or is hearing gripes about error messages whenever users try to click a button to perform some action.
In this section, we will discuss a methodology to help you troubleshoot a problem when you don't necessarily have all the information at your disposal. We will include some specific questions that can be asked verbatim for virtually any application.
The first key to success in troubleshooting an application problem is to narrow down where and when it happens. Let's take these two very different problems suggested above (slow performance and error messages), and pose questions that might help unravel them:
Does the problem occur when you take a specific action? If so, what is that action? Your users might say, "It's slow whenever I open the application...
