Tales of Testing in Production
Software testing challenges us to find faster and more effective ways to assess risk to our users and the systems that support those users. Those faster and more effective risk assessments require compromises between available time, equipment capacity, market viability, and our desire to provide great results to our users. This talk uses experiences from 6 years of maintaining, testing, and delivering the Jenkins git plugin as a way to highlight the complications and the compromises involved in software testing in production environments and in widely varied environments. This is an experience report that includes several observations about ways that Mark has made mistakes in software testing and has corrected his flawed assumptions. Test configuration, test improvement, and the compromises between exploratory testing and test automation will be discussed with examples showing more effective and less effective cases for each.
Mark Waite maintains the Jenkins git plugin and is the Jenkins documentation officer. He's a long-time contributor to the Jenkins project and has been involved in software delivery and software testing for many years. He's a manager at CloudBees and a frequent contributor to open source software. He is one of the maintainers of the Jenkins project infrastructure, including the ci.jenkins.io continuous integration server. He's managed and worked in small software companies and large multi-national corporations. He frequently shares blog posts and has presented continuous integration webinars and in-person training sessions at Jenkins World, Mile High Agile, and other conferences.