The application lifecycle doesn’t finish with app deployment. Feedback is an important element of refining an application, whether that’s exception detection and diagnoses or improving the user experience. In this course, we will look at a suite of services that capture a vast array of feedback data, ranging from exceptions to client and server telemetry. This data can be turned into easily digestible information that can be used to trigger alerts and feedback into the development lifecycle as work items.
This course begins by describing what feedback is, and the types of feedback for improving application performance and usability. It then moves on to how we can integrate feedback into the software development lifecycle and what tools we can use to simplify that task. Finally, we will look at optimizing feedback mechanisms to get meaningful data from feedback noise.
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Learning Objectives
- Designing application and user feedback loops
- Setting up crash and event notifications for App Center
- Setting up work item integration from App Center
- Making sense of App Center’s analytic and diagnostic information
- Adding Application Insights Telemetry to an application
- Setting up Application Insights alerts
- Work item integration from Application Insights
- Designing feedback dashboards
- Viewing Application Insights Telemetry data
- Discussing types of user feedback and how they can be captured
- Ways to baseline and filter feedback data
Intended Audience
This course is intended for:
- People preparing for Microsoft’s AZ-400 exam
- App developers
- Project managers
Prerequisites
To get the most from this course, you should have some experience with Microsoft Azure and application development, as well as knowledge of software project management concepts.
What is feedback?
When people think of feedback generally one of two types come to mind, and which one of those will depend largely on how old you are. In the modern consumer marketing world, the younger audience might first think of customer feedback in the form of ratings or surveys. This has become pervasive in our social media-driven society where continuous improvement and customer satisfaction have become corporate clichés. We will look at this later. Older people might first think of audio feedback as first popularized by the likes of Jimi Hendrix. While both of these are examples of feedback, I want to start by looking at feedback loops.
At the elementary level, a feedback loop is where the output of a system is fed back as input into itself. Positive feedback loops tend to amplify a system’s output, as in audio feedback while negative feedback loops tend to make a system more stable, directing it towards an average output. Self-drive cars and machine learning systems are good examples of feedback loops. In the context of application software, we want feedback from the code that will allow us to improve reliability and performance. We take the output metrics from the code and feed it back as input into the development system. In theory, very simple. In practice not so much. I hear you ask “what are these output metrics, and where do they come from?”
Hallam is a software architect with over 20 years experience across a wide range of industries. He began his software career as a Delphi/Interbase disciple but changed his allegiance to Microsoft with its deep and broad ecosystem. While Hallam has designed and crafted custom software utilizing web, mobile and desktop technologies, good quality reliable data is the key to a successful solution. The challenge of quickly turning data into useful information for digestion by humans and machines has led Hallam to specialize in database design and process automation. Showing customers how leverage new technology to change and improve their business processes is one of the key drivers keeping Hallam coming back to the keyboard.