How I Test Less and Still Have High Performance Apps

Being agile means being agile all the way through the development process, including deployment and production. Every team should have a full complement of profiling, testing and load generation tools, but we all know that even with the most rigorous pre-deployment QA, issues will sneak through. To catch these, all serious apps use production monitoring of one kind or another. The ah-ha moment comes when we realize that we can use that same production monitoring to increase our agility: we can shorten the pre-production testing cycles and push new iterations into production with minimal testing. I'll talk about how we've done this, and how our customers have done this: we've become more agile, we test less, and we've reduced our risks. I have real life examples/war stories to share and I hope to enthuse you to become "agile all the way down".

Bjorn Freeman-Benson is proud to be part of the engineering team at New Relic, officially as the Director of Engineering, but unofficially as a software psychologist. He spends his day listening to the software tell him about its troubles, and then works to resolve the problems, be they technical, process, or people-related. He's passionate about delivering value to customers and loves the continuous improvements that delivering software as a service enables. Bjorn has worked in open source, closed source, big companies, small companies, and even as a university professor (Eclipse, Amazon, Rational, Gemstone, OTI, ...). He has an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, and is happy to talk at length about his passion for orienteering and/or his love of flying.