The road to enlightenment: How we learned to stop worrying and start treating infrastructure like any other feature – Abby Bangser and James Spargo

21st December 2016
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Abby Bangser's profile
Abby Bangser

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

james spargo's profile
james spargo

The road to enlightenment: How we learned to stop worrying and start treating infrastructure like any other feature – Abby Bangser and James Spargo image
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Talk Description

Ever think to yourself “I’d just love to be a fly on the wall of someone else having these problems”? Well here is your chance!

As a developer, James was tasked with building out both the production environment and the path our application code would take to get there. Abby was a Quality Analyst on the team and worked closely with the application team to identify risks early on, build quality into the application from the beginning, and drive team exploratory testing. This is where our interesting story starts.

We will take you on our quest to bring business needs to the forefront of infrastructure and deployment work. We wanted to treat infrastructure code the same way as application code, stories that provide business value, acceptance criteria following SMART principles, and testability at both an automated and exploratory level.This quest wasn’t always an easy one. We’re also going to talk about the highs, lows, heated debates, disagreements and celebrations in the hope of saving you from some of the same pains that we experienced on our quest for enlightened infrastructure work.

Through a combination of dramatic re-enactments, interspersed with presentations of the details, we will explain the situations we found ourselves in, the way we handled those situations (the good, the bad, and the ugly) and the learnings we took from them. You will leave this session a believer that by taking a more analytical view of infrastructure work, both the development team and the business will have the confidence to quickly and reliably deploy their application.

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

  • TBA
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Abby Bangser is a software tester with a keen interest in working on products where fellow engineers are the users. Abby brings the techniques of analysing and testing customer facing products to tools like delivery pipelines and logging so as to generate clearer feedback and greater value. Abby has a strong background in QA across software projects and platform engineering teams which she is now using in her new role as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE).

Outside of work Abby is active in the community by co-leading Speak Easy which mentors new and diverse speakers, co-hosting the London free meetup Software Testing Clinic which brings together mentors and new joiners to the software testing industry, and hosting the London branch of #CoffeeOps meetup. You can get in touch easiest on Twitter at @a_bangser.

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