Testing in Production - dangerous, scary or better - Jon Hare-Winton thumbnail

Testing in Production - dangerous, scary or better - Jon Hare-Winton

18 May 2017
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Everyone runs their tests on a safe, separate test environment. But what if we let our automated tests loose on our production systems? Is that a dangerous thing to do, is it worth the risk?

I’ll discuss why this can seem a daunting prospect, but demonstrate the huge benefits of testing in production. I’ll briefly discuss some of the downsides to testing in isolated, unrepresentative test environments, before giving an account of my experiences over the last couple of years of trying to test in production as much as possible.

I’ll demonstrate some of the benefits, like how we can take conventional automated tests and turn them into monitoring and early alerting systems for our production environments, and the safety steps we need to take to make sure our production tests don’t affect our users.

Join the discussion about TestBash Belfast over at The Club


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