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Testing Does not Stop After Code is Pushed into Production
Your mileage may vary on Ryan Gosling films. I happen to be a fan, and I always chuckle during the climactic scene in The Notebook. Drenched in rain, Gosling says to Rachel McAdams’ character, “It wasn’t over. It still isn’t over.” He of course is talking about their relationship, but I could easily draw a parallel here with testing. While in the past it may have seemed that a tester’s job was done once code was pushed into production, that is no longer the case.
There are two things that customers demand from a company such as Sauce; speed and quality. In the early days of testing, we thought of speed and quality as an either/or situation, almost mutually exclusive. The concept of DevOps has taught us that we can actually have both. One of the ways we do this is by testing through production. We have tools now to identify whether the code is behaving properly via continuous testing. We can utilize feedback loops, production error monitoring, and build environments where we can find out whether users are running into issues before rolling the software out to a wider audience.
Now, to be clear, testing in production doesn't necessarily mean that the QA people and the testers are actually hacking on buttons inside the user interface. It means that they're aware of the signals that are being sent by production software, which at this point they still seem to be siloed away from. By leveraging these philosophies, we are able to deliver that intersection of quality and speed that our customers demand.
Check out this video for more on testing in production.
Check back next week for the season finale where I give some parting thoughts on quality.
