Testing in Production

Testing on Production, deep backend edition - Mykola Gurov
Why do we test on production? Why not avoid this risk at any cost?

Thorough testing before merging to master is great, but it doesn’t cover the unknowns. Staging on shared environments tends to be slow, unreliable and costly to support. Why not just learn from the only true environment by conducting safe and efficient experiments?

This talk is based on my experience of "shifting to the right" testing within the context of back-end systems of bol.com (one of the biggest online retailers of the Netherlands; logistics and purchasing domains), where correctness is often a bigger concern than performance, and recovery might require a bit more than users hitting the refresh button of their browser.

Testing on production is often associated with A/B testing or canary releases, but those aren't always the best - or even applicable - techniques. We will look instead at shadow and dry runs, controlled experiments, survival of the fittest; how to apply these techniques and what to be aware of.

Observe the system: two sides of the same coin - João Rosa

Observability is one of the buzzwords of the day. We have the 3 pillars, a plethora of tools, great books. We moved our monolithic apps that lived in the datacenter to distributed microservices in the cloud, with the promised land of cost savings and an Agile organisation. However, are we delivering more business value?

Today, we send metrics to the systems managed by the Operations Team and at the same time to the Business Intelligence systems. However, we have the will for our teams to have autonomy and ownership of the systems which they put into production. How can we merge the best of both worlds, giving autonomy to our development teams, have a reliable system and increase the business value delivered?

Join João on his journey, using collaboration techniques from the DDD community to discover the Domain Events that generated business value and how it is related to the technical components of the system. During his talk, he will address the challenges of bringing the two sides of the same coin together, creating a healthy environment among all parties.

Agenda
18:00 Doors open + dinner
18:30 Mykola Gurov - Testing on Production, deep backend edition
19:30 João Rosa - Observe the system: two sides of the same coin
Business too!
20:30 Drinks