Service Mesh technologies such as Istio, LinkedD and Conduit are becoming common on the microservice landscape. A Service Mesh is a layer of architecture in the cloud native environment that handles communication between microservices. Working in the cloud has become more prevalent in the world of performance testing, so too will working with service discovery technologies such as the service registry and the service mesh.
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Many new-to-agile teams encounter this problem: How do we use test automation when we don’t know what we need for a final tool? Instead of a top-down approach, consider an agile approach to a test automation tool: create a hypothesis, do the smallest work possible to test that hypothesis, and improve the automation bit by bit, over time.
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For all those who did, and for those who couldn’t make it along – here’s the video from yesterday’s Continuous Testing with TestRail webinar.
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I’d characterize a lot of the software work I’ve done over the years as a feature factory. Usually this factory is kicked into action by a new customer. The testing work for these features can differ in difficulty, but I can always see a way forward. Recently however, I have spent a lot of time with changes that aren’t as obviously customer-facing: refactors, library upgrades and changes to core functionality such as authorization. Let’s talk about what testers can do in these scenarios.
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Most organizations have Disaster Recovery Plans (DRP) and Business Continuity Plans (BCP), but few can claim that they are confident the plans are complete. Will your plans be up to the challenge of a major disruption or disaster? Do your employees know what to do and when? The only way you’ll know if you’re ready is to test your plans. In this article we’ll introduce an effective way to test your plans and educate your personnel – without facing a real disaster. This process will give you real insight into how well your DRP/BCP will work.
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Regression defects can be the most frustrating thing in the software world. Regression defects occur when a change you make to the software actually creates a problem. Sooner or later, you will encounter a regression defect in any piece of non-trivial software. But if you find yourself buried in an avalanche of them every time you ship software, something is wrong. Lets take a look at a variety of strategies to reduce the regression defect count.
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There are some big changes happening on my test team. With three testers in the team and a change in Product Manager, we needed to rethink our workflow. Spearheading a new way of working was exciting, but I wasn’t sure how it would scale with more testers working in the team room. Based on the changing situation, here’s how we’ve decided on a development process that includes the product manager, and reduces the amount of individual attention we need from the lead developer to carry out our testing.
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Edge computing is becoming more prominent in application design, particularly with the growth of the Internet of Things. Making IoT devices responsible for some aspects of application logic reduces operational costs. This is good, but it also creates a hazard. Most performance techniques are browser, native, mobile and server based. You cannot use these techniques when it comes to performance testing hundreds of smart refrigerators distributed world wide, or a city full of video cameras designed to transmit only on movement. This is the new world of edge case performance testing.
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While specific methodologies such as TDD still attract a lot of controversy, I think it’s fair to say that unit testing itself is a lot closer to a consensus. We’re clearly not there yet, but we’re getting closer and closer. With that in mind, what can a unit testing novice do to ensure their unit tests are good, maintainable, and reliable? Here are five simple tips you can follow to improve the quality of your tests.
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Scott Ambler proposed an additional value to the “agile modeling” process (a subset of XP focused on design modeling for software)- humility. He argued that the best developers have the humility to recognize that they don’t know everything, that their fellow developers, their customers, and in fact all project stakeholders also have their own areas of expertise and have value to add to a project. How Does Humility Help?
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