Observability Meets a Flaky Test
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Locked
João Proença
Quality Engineer
Talk Description
“Observability”. A word that is quite popular in tech these days, but not always easy to understand what it means in the real world, right? “How is it not monitoring?”
I mean, we’re told that it’s about “unknown unknowns” and that you should be able to answer new questions about a system without having to ship any code. We’re also told that there are three pillars for observability, “logs, metrics and traces”, and that it’s much more than just monitoring. But how does that translate to real-life scenarios in a software tester’s world?
Well, one day my team was struggling with a flaky test in our CI/CD pipeline. The way we were able to unravel the mystery surrounding that test illustrates a few key observability concepts on the availability of data and the friction in accessing it.
In this talk I will tell you the story about that painful flaky test and how it showed us how (the lack of) observability could already be present in our daily lives, without us even realizing it! By the end of this tale, even if you know nothing about observability beforehand, you will understand a bit more. You’ll know some questions you should start asking about your own tests, and have some ideas that will let you find the answers quickly!
What you’ll learn
By the end of this talk, you'll be able to:
- Learn what “unknown unknowns” actually look like in real life and how they relate to observability
- Find out how observability can be your greatest ally when dealing with flaky tests
- Acknowledge that you may have a lot of useful information scattered throughout your systems
- Understand the importance of having data stored in one place and multiple views of that data
João Proença
Quality Engineer
Suggested Content
Tags
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automation
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observability
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testbash-uk
