Reopen "How to identify the responsibilities for a health check?" after edit?

Question

What should be the scope of a health check for a system which deploys a webapp?

I believe this question is now on topic.

The comments make the following objections:

I'm thinking it's the job of the person who asked you to "write a health check" to define what they mean by "health". Otherwise, it's just guesswork. – Jörg W Mittag 4 hours ago

I agree with @JörgWMittag comment, but I'd even take it a step further. You should get your requirements not only from the person who told you that you need to design a "health check", but also figure out who the people or systems are who use the data that is part of a health check and figure out what they need or how they need it. These are your requirements that will drive your design. – Thomas Owens♦ 2 hours ago

I believe that those perspectives are in fact valuable answers to this question.

Many programmers will have to add healthchecks to applications at some point. Understanding that there are multiple factors to consider, such as the above comments, is in my opinion the answer to this question.

For this reason I believe this question is a valuable and answerable question for both the asker as well as the broader programmer community.

Answer 1

Leave Closed

I don't think the question should be reopened even after its edit. The answers along the line “get more requirements” might be correct, but they are in no way specific to app health monitoring systems. Maybe we should create a canonical dupe target for “I have to design a program with unclear requirements, what should I do?” where we can explain how to arrive at requirements, but that sounds pretty broad.

Incidentally, the current answers listing ideas for health metrics that could be checked are a classic example of a “list of things” question that should be closed as too broad.

It is irrelevant within certain limits whether a question is valuable or interesting. It matters whether a question is on-topic, objective, and reasonably scoped. I don't quite see the scope as sufficiently tight in this case. Sorry.

Answer 2

I still don't think the question should be reopened. I think the edit changes the close reason from "primarily opinion based" to "too broad".

The question, in it's new form, can be answered. The answer is "go get better requirements". However, there are entire books on software requirements engineering. Just telling someone that they need to go get better requirements in order to solve their problem doesn't actually solve their problem. It should be extremely obvious to "professionals and students in software development and related fields" that, when you are given such a vague task, you should get more information from the appropriate stakeholders.

If the asker has specific questions about eliciting requirements, they should go check out some existing resources - read a book (I linked to 7 above), search the Internet, read existing questions about requirements engineering here, or do some other basic research. I'm sure that if they are having problems with eliciting or managing requirements, we could help with those specific problems. But that is an entirely different question.

Note that I wouldn't want to delete this question. It should just remain closed, as is. The answers that exist are generally useful for other people who are searching for information about writing a health status monitor for software. Leaving it open, though, indicates that this is the kind of question that we want. I don't think that it is.

Answer 3

Based on the feedback here that the question was too broad, I narrowed the scope to the OP's original case only, and voted to reopen.

So definition of question changed from

"How should one determine what a health check should actually do when writing one?" with a single specific example

to

"What should be the scope of a health check for a system which deploys a webapp?" with additional specific questions about items to include or not include in this type of health check.