(A talk at PIPELINE Conference 2015, London – https://pipelineconf.info/2015-event/speakers/)

Testing in production used to be taboo – a sign that you had a lax attitude to QA. Now it is increasingly accepted that the opposite is true, and that if you only test your system in artificial environments you don’t really know it works. We’ll see some examples of the benefits we have experienced from testing in production – not limiting ourselves to just using live data, we deliberately avoid test environments and deploy changes straight to live – the only real source of truth about our application’s behaviour. We’ll also show you the tools and techniques we use to test feature functionality, performance, and failure scenarios in production ranging from increasing the throughput of our systems as a live load-test to deliberately introducing malfunctioning and badly behaved software as error simulations.

Alex Wilson has been a software developer at Unruly for approaching 3 years, during which time he has had the opportunity to experience and conquer different scaling issues. He takes particular joy in both the application of Continuous Delivery principles, and pushing the boundaries of XP through testing in production and mob programming.

Benji Weber is a full-stack developer at Unruly, where he leads an extreme programming team building a programmatic advertising platform using Java, and a sprinkling of other languages. Benji is enthusiastic about anything that helps build valuable and reliable software fast, including domain driven design, continuous deployment, and infrastructure automation.