May 4, 2023
The shift to modern app development has done a lot to improve developer efficiency, and that’s a great thing. But it’s a little bit like the second law of thermodynamics: if you create order somewhere, you create chaos somewhere else.
In this case, it’s the dysfunction that can happen when pieces of code written by different teams come together. This potential for problems increases when different microservices mix with different infrastructures in different environments — from the outer dev loop all the way to production. If it’s cloud native and running in AWS or other CSPs there are even more cloud native infrastructure elements in the mix that can create dysfunction.
Shift left testing can only accomplish Test Easy if it does two things. One is to reduce the effort required by devs to design and run tests, and understand and share their output.
The other is to consider, often through abstraction, those infrastructure and cloud native elements that give their tests meaning, giving them and others in the CI CD pipeline confidence.
There are many things that can be done to support these two pillars of Test Easy. Particularly on the “testing built for modern apps from the ground up” front. We’ll talk more about them in upcoming blogs.