Observability: Unlearn Guessing, Reduce Stressing and Learn to Embrace Reality - Rob Meaney

Talk Description

For the last 5 years, I’ve been lucky enough to work on bleeding edge software initiatives using things like microservices, containerisation, cloud-based platforms and CICD to deliver more value more quickly to our customers.

So, how can testers keep pace in these incredibly fast-paced environments while trying to test these highly volatile, complex distributed systems?

This scary new world presents an entirely new set of challenges and risks for teams and consequently requires a whole team approach to testing and development.

We as testers need to unlearn our old ideas about testing and learn to accept that we can’t predict system behaviour and that failure is inevitable. The truth is our job is no longer finished when we deploy to production it’s just beginning.

In the face of this reality, we need to focus not just on prevention but also on detection and recovery so that our teams can move quickly and safely with justifiable confidence.

Teams need to build observability into their systems from the start so that can quickly detect important problems, isolate the cause and remediate the issue with minimal impact to the customer.

In this session I’ll talk about my observability journey and the lessons we’ve learned. I’ll discuss how I’ve used mapping exercises, models and workshops to help development teams embrace reality and build observability into both their software systems and the way they work.

What you’ll learn

By the end of this talk, you'll be able to: