Pia Fåk Sunnanbo

Testing in Production

“I don’t always test my code. But when I do, I do it in production."

You may recognize this classic meme and its underlying message that testing in production is a really bad practice, maybe even worse than not testing at all. The facts are however that no production-like test environment you’ll create is like production itself. No other environment will have exactly its data, its traffic or its users.

This session is about admitting that whatever test strategy you have, production will eventually test your system. It’s about using this insight to make production testing safe and useful. We’ll walk through hands-on examples of techniques like canary deploys, synthetic monitoring, and feature flags. These techniques enable safe, incremental delivery, guided by short feedback loops. The heart of agile software development, if you ask me.

Pia Fåk Sunnanbo

I’ve been a software engineering professional for the last 15 years, mostly as a developer, but sometimes as a teacher, manager, scrum master and public speaker. I love coding, but over the years I’ve found it increasingly fascinating to study the complex interactions of humans and technology: How new technology changes the interactions of humans, and how human interactions shape new technology. My hope is that sharing my insights into the human/tech cross section will help making people happier and more productive at work.