Read: A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps

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Reading this book was long overdue, and I’m glad I can finally scratch this off my TBR list. I purchased it within a week of its release back in 2017, but only got around to reading it this week. Oh, well. The book is Katrina Clokie’s A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps. I feel like it’s such a mine of references, and a jumping point for so many other things to read or watch.

For each of the chapters in the book, I tried to highlight some of the references or topics that I found interesting.

Testing in a DevOps Culture

  • Test strategy retrospective
  • Agile assessment How agile is your testing?, and book recommendations if you scored less than five out of ten
  • Two pizza rule for team sizes — I just thought that, depending on the restaurant and the sizes they offer, I can easily eat a whole pizza by myself.
  • Section on blazing a trail – “When I’m blazing a trail I’m building a path to someone new in the organisation…” — This isn’t limited to DevOps; feels relatable as we’re building the local practice and the CoP.
  • Ioana Serban’s “Three Little Questions” from TestOps: Chasing the White Whale (YouTube)
  • Links to blog posts of applying visualization when testing a product
  • Pair testing experiment framework

Testing in Development

Testing in Production

  • Sections on testing monitoring, analytics and logging
  • “There’s the well-known example of how Google used A/B testing to determine which shade of blue to use on their toolbar. They tested 41 gradients to learn the colour people preferred, which was seen by some as a trivial attribute to experiment with.”
  • “Google are well known for running lengthy beta programs. Gmail, was labelled as beta for five years from 2004 to 2009.”
  • Should Tesla be ‘beta testing’ autopilot if there is a chance someone might die?
  • TIL passive validation. Differences between active and passive validation reference is Testing in Production (Vimeo) by Seth Eliot.
  • The terms to describe variations of exposure control such as canary release, staged rollout, dogfooding, and dark launching

Testing in DevOps Environments

Industry Examples

No bullet points here. It’s not that I didn’t find anything in this section interesting. On the contrary, I feel like this section is something you can check out to look for content that fits or closely aligns to your own testing context.

Test Strategy in DevOps

  • Conducting a Risk Workshop
  • Several links around rethinking and reimagining the testing pyramid – 1, 2, 3, 4
  • The testing pendulum depicting the extremes of whether your testing is too deep or too shallow
  • A couple of links around the shift to TestOps – 1, 2
  • A section on heuristics for removing a tester
  • A couple of links on visual test strategies – 1*, 2

*Original links no longer worked so I had to google for the latest link.

And again, here’s the book’s link: https://leanpub.com/testingindevops

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