Scientist.NET

A .NET interpretation of the Ruby library Scientist, a library for carefully refactoring critical paths.

How do I science?

Let's pretend you're changing the way you handle permissions in a large web app. Tests can help guide your refactoring, but you really want to capture the current and refactored beahviours under load.

using Scientist;

namespace MyNamespace 
{
    public class MyClass
    {
        private MyModel Model;    
    
        public bool MyMethod(User User)
        {
            var experiment = new Experiment<bool>("widget-permissions");
            experiment.Use(() => Model.CheckUser(User).Valid); // old way
            experiment.Try(() => User.Can(Permission.Read, Model); // new way
        
            return experiment.Run();    
        }
    }
}

Use Use(..) to wrap the existing original behaviour, and use Try(..) to wrap the new behaviour. experiment.Run(); will always return the result of the Use block, but it does a bunch of stuff behind the scenes:

• It decides whether or not to run the Try block
• Measures the duration of both behaviours
• Swallows (but records) any exceptions raised in the Try block
• Set a condition to filter calls to Try
• Randomises order to execute Try and Use blocks

Upcoming features (these already exist in the Ruby library):

• Publishes all the information gathered
• Turn project into a NuGet package