Stressful Situations Make You Stupid

Today we came across an interesting issue at work: we have two teams A and B who interchange API calls. Team A needed an API from team B to process a business that is owned by team B of course. The signature was like the following:

public OutputEntity MyMethod(List listOfIds);

It appeared afterward that this method was very slow, and the client was already very upset about the low performance, which consequently caused big pressure on the teams by the superiors to enhance the performance.
After investigating the issue, it appeared that the list of ID’s sent as input consists of some ID’s that do not need to be processed, this criteria of “not need to be processed” is a business owned by team B, done by using properties of the entities these ID’s represent. So the  solution to this issue was one of the following:

1. Moving the business out of the API to the client application to do the filtering, since the calling method already has the entities themselves (not so good to move business out of scope!)
2. Let the API do the filtering, but this will worsen the performance because the API will have to retrieve these entities from the database in order to use its’ properties!

So is that a dead end? actually that was stupid! the situation was stressful enough and pressured by our superiors to enhance the performance that we missed a very simple fact: pass the list of entities themselves!

Stressful situations make us stupid, so make as less stress as possible on your team, help them to be smarter.