Every deploy, after all, is a unique and never-to-be-replicated combination of artifact, environment, infra, and time of day

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Interesting:

And if testing is about uncertainty, you “test” any time you deploy to production. Every deploy, after all, is a unique and never-to-be-replicated combination of artifact, environment, infra, and time of day. By the time you’ve tested, it has changed.

Once you deploy, you aren’t testing code anymore, you’re testing systems—complex systems made up of users, code, environment, infrastructure, and a point in time. These systems have unpredictable interactions, lack any sane ordering, and develop emergent properties which perpetually and eternally defy your ability to deterministically test.

The phrase “I don’t always test, but when I do, I test in production” seems to insinuate that you can only do one or the other: test before production or test in production. But that’s a false dichotomy. All responsible teams perform both kinds of tests.

Yet we only confess to the first type of testing, the “responsible” type. Nobody admits to the second, much less talks about how we could do it better and more safely. Nobody invests in their “test in prod” tooling. And that’s one reason we do it so poorly.

Post external references

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    https://increment.com/testing/i-test-in-production/
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