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

13th January 2023

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Jon

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

Talk Description

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

What you’ll learn

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

Describe what testing in production is
Compare the traditional flow of test environments versus testing in production
Outline the pros and cons of using test environments
List what monitoring can and can't help with
Identify advantages to testing in production
Describe how to hide testing in production

Jon

I am a Senior Automation Engineer at the Guardian. I worked originally as a manual tester, before moving into Automation and more general Development across the media, marketing and finance industries, and am a regular contributor to the Guardian developer blog. I have a passion for pushing the conceptions of what a Tester can be, and what Testing and Quality teams can deliver to wider software development, beyond conventional test practices.