A weekly source of software testing news
ISSUE #3 - Feb 20th, 2017
I try to focus on one main topic in each weekly issue of Tester’s Digest, with news sprinkled in.
In today’s world, you’d have to be in a rather niche space to not be testing distributed systems, so most aspects apply whether you’re testing a system built on microservices, a web app that relies on AWS for its backend, an online game, or a large-scale NoSQL database. Global village, you know.
This remains required reading for newcomers to distributed systems (testers and coders alike):
https://www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/01/14/notes-on-distributed-systems-for-young-bloods/
Great list of testing resources:
https://github.com/asatarin/testing-distributed-systems
The challenges of scaling a system, as experienced by Uber, with “what I wish I knew” style lessons, and a prominent mention of load and failure testing:
How Facebook does load testing in production (live! but safely)
How do you uncover bugs in distributed storage systems during testing, rather than in production? These Microsoft folks exercised a test harness against systems written in the .NET framework, and found 8 bugs in MS Azure products that were hard to find with traditional testing techniques.
The two posts above come from The Morning Paper, a blog I hugely respect.
On the probability of data loss in large clusters, with the math (subtly incorrect, so be sure to read the comments about replication time being a factor in mean time to data loss):
http://martin.kleppmann.com/2017/01/26/data-loss-in-large-clusters.html
A recent post on migrating data at scale, safely (Stripe’s account, pretty standard dual-writing approach). Does not cover the testing angle… left as an exercise to the reader?
https://stripe.com/blog/online-migrations
One approach to spreading good testing practices while, uh, not spreading germs. I swear this is not an April Fool’s post:
https://testing.googleblog.com/2007/01/introducing-testing-on-toilet.html
As proof that the above was not a joke, here is the most recent installment of Testing on the Toilet, direct from Google’s restrooms to yours:
https://testing.googleblog.com/2017/01/testing-on-toilet-keep-cause-and-effect.html
There were maybe a dozen posts total over the years, search for “testing on the toilet” to see them all.
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