Speculative fan-out

Example: support ticket triage

Let’s imagine you are building a support system that needs to triage support tickets. You need to classify the ticket into a category. If it’s a bug report, you also need to determine the severity of the bug.

Instead of asking for the category first and then the severity in a follow-up call, you can ask for both at the same time. If the ticket is not a bug report, you simply ignore the results of the bug severity question.

Step 1: speculative fan-out

Speculative questions: bug_severity and has_reproducible_steps only matter if the ticket is a bug report. refund_requested only matters for billing. We include all upfront because additional questions usually have little effect on response time. If the ticket turns out to be a feature request, the bug severity result will be irrelevant, in which case your code path simply ignores it.

Step 2: route with code

Your code decides what is relevant based on the classification result:

triage.py

category = response.answers["category"]
bug_severity = response.answers["bug_severity"]
bug_repro = response.answers["has_reproducible_steps"]
refund = response.answers["refund_requested"]
frustration = response.answers["frustration"]

if category.choice == "bug_report":
    if bug_severity.score > 1.5 and bug_repro.noul > 0.6:
        escalate_to_engineering(ticket_id, severity="high")
    else:
        add_to_bug_backlog(ticket_id)

elif category.choice == "billing":
    if refund.noul > 0.7:
        route_to_billing_with_flag(ticket_id, refund_likely=True)
    else:
        route_to_billing(ticket_id)

elif category.choice == "feature_request":
    log_feature_request(ticket_id)

# Frustration is useful regardless of category
if frustration.score > 1.5:
    flag_for_priority_response(ticket_id)

Everything needed for the full decision tree comes from one call. Speculative questions are ignored when irrelevant and save a round trip when they are not.

Introduction

Concepts

Foundations

Patterns

Demos

Speculative fan-out

Example: support ticket triage

Step 1: speculative fan-out

Step 2: route with code

​Example: support ticket triage

​Step 1: speculative fan-out

​Step 2: route with code

Example: support ticket triage

Step 1: speculative fan-out

Step 2: route with code