Laboratory

A library for carefully refactoring critical paths, with support for Python 2.7 & 3.3+

Laboratory is all about sure-footed refactoring achieved through experimentation. By conducting experiments and verifying their results, not only can we see if our refactored code is misbehaving, we have established a feedback loop to help us correct its behaviour.

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Note

These docs are a work in progress. Additional documentation can be found in the project’s README

Quickstart

See: Installation or pip install laboratory

With Laboratory you conduct an experiment with your known-good code as the control block and a new code branch as a candidate.

Let’s do an experiment together:

import laboratory

# create an experiment
experiment = laboratory.Experiment()

# set your control and candidate functions
experiment.control(authorise_control, args=(user,))
experiment.candidate(authorise_candidate, args=(user,))

# conduct the experiment and return the control value
authorised = experiment.conduct()

Laboratory just:

  • Executed the unproven (candidates) and the existing (control) code
  • Compared the return values
  • Recorded timing information about all code
  • Caught (and logged) exceptions in the unproven code
  • Published all of this information (see Publishing results)

For the most part that’s all there is to it. You’ll need to do some work to publish your results in order to act on the experiment, but if you’ve got a metrics solution ready to go it should be straightforward.

If you need to control comparison, you can do that too.

Tip

Your control and candidate functions execute in a random order to help catch ordering issues

Indices and tables