Archive for February, 2017

I was in Finland recently, at the European Testing Conference. I both attended the conference and presented a workshop about “Approval testing with TextTest“. I won’t say any more about that, since Ben Linders did a brilliant write-up already that was published on InfoQ. There were several other highlights, and I wanted to just share a paragraph or so about each.

Mob Testing is what happens when your development team decides to work together on testing tasks as a Mob. I took part in a workshop where Maaret Pyhäjärvi facilitated two different mobbing exercises, one where we automated some UI tests using Selenium, and one where we practiced Test-Driven Development on the FizzBuzz kata. I have already done some Mob Programming and this felt very similar, except the focus was on developing tests rather than production code. It seems to have similar benefits – you have access to all the knowledge of everyone in the team, and you can learn things you didn’t even know to ask about. It makes pairing seem like a slow way to share good working practices.

JUnit 5 is on the horizon, and has several useful improvements over the previous version. Generally the syntax clutter is reduced, and the way you create parameterized tests has been overhauled. The most significant change though, (especially for people like me who work on developing other testing tools), seems to be that they’re designing the test-running engine to be separated so you can re-use it to run other kinds of tests. Any infrastructure that works with JUnit will then be able to run these other tests as well. In principle it opens up JUnit’s success as a platform, to be re-used by other test frameworks. Thanks Nicolai Parlog for this useful summary of the next generation of one of the most widely-used tools in the Java world.

Joel Hynoski has worked at many of the tech giants in our industry, including Google, Twitter, Apple, and now Lyft. He spoke about some of the engineering challenges they had overcome, specifically in the area of testing. One thing I liked was their tool that detects flaky tests, and puts them in ‘jail’. (A flaky test is one that sometimes passes and sometimes fails, when run against the same code. They are a pain and can be a huge waste of time.) When a test is in ‘jail’, that means it’s no longer run in the build pipeline, so it doesn’t block new releases. It instead gets flagged as needing maintenance. They then have a SLA that says how long a test is allowed to remain in jail before an engineer needs to look at it and fix the flakyness – a day or two I think.

I can feel a little in awe of someone who has worked in those kinds of famous engineering organizations, working at web-scale with some of the best developers in our industry. What I found most encouraging about talking to Joel, was that he was very down to earth about the problems these organizations face. They still battle with legacy code, despite it often only being a few years old. They have trouble creating reliable automated tests. The developers don’t always trust the test automation. They still have production bugs and hotfixes…

Alex Schladebeck spent the first ten minutes of her presentation giving a splendid rant about the bad reputation of UI testing. To summarize: (criticisms she hears about UI tests -> her responses)

UI tests give slow feedback -> and valuable feedback, doesn’t have to be after every build
need more infrastructure/machines -> yes, deal with it
they’re the top of the test pyramid -> they are in the pyramid! you can’t ignore them. They find different stuff than unit tests. Consider your context.
they’re flaky -> they’re not as bad as they used to be! Could be your app isn’t designed for testabilty? Could be your test design is poor?
they cause lots of work when small changes in your app -> that happens in development work too! Also, happens more if you design them badly.

She then went on to give some excellent advice about how to design your UI tests. It was mostly about layering your test code in different levels of abstraction, and getting a good collaboration going between developers and testing specialists.

Conferences are about meeting people and the organizers of this conference had very deliberately scheduled sessions to encourage this. We had a ‘speed dating’ session where you talk to about 8 random people for five minutes each. We had a ‘lean coffee’ session, where all the speakers were each asked to facilitate a discussion table. I thought this worked particularly well as a way to find people with similar interests, and get them to talk about their experiences. The hands-on workshops were all at the same time, so you had to go to one and not just attend talks all the time. There was also an open space scheduled when it would not clash with any other kinds of sessions. I thought all this together made for a pretty welcoming conference where you were bound to get to know new people.

Overall I had a really good time at this conference and I’d recommend it to both testers and developers with a strong quality focus.

Note: This post first appeared on Pagero’s blog

One of the questions that Kent Beck asked when he was developing the eXtreme Programming development methodology, was what happens if we turn the dials up all the way to 10? Take a practice we know is good, and do more of it? Practices like Test-Driven Development and Pair Programming are what he came up with, starting from manual testing and code review.

In the same way, Continuous Delivery is what you get if you turn the dials to 10 on your annual release cycle. You get to the point that you are pushing out new code to users, many times a day.

“Shortening the release cycle like this has a lot of advantages, especially around risk and quality.”

LOWER RISK AND HIGHER QUALITY WITH SHORTER RELEASE CYCLES

Shortening the release cycle like this has a lot of advantages, especially around risk and quality. Basically, you’re decreasing the batch size, a well-known tenet of lean manufacturing. If each new release contains fewer changes, then you have fewer places to look when things go wrong, so finding bugs is easier. You also lower the risk that any individual batch has a defect in the first place. By having an engineering setup that allows you to make code changes at the drop of a hat and push them out to production easily, you facilitate getting fixes out quickly.

So the upshot is quality problems surface sporadically instead of all at once, and are more easily dealt with. It’s an attractive prospect for us, especially with the growth in traffic we’re experiencing. Every time we have a defect in production, it affects a proportion of our customers, and the number of customers is increasing all the time. If we had a small bug a year ago that affected one or two customers, today the same bug might affect tens or even hundreds.

FROM MONOLITH TO MICROSERVICES FOR GREATER FLEXIBILITY

At Pagero, historically we’ve been pushing out a new version of our product “Pagero Online”, about once a month. We’ve been able to sustain that since about 2007. So when we began looking at Continuous Delivery, about three years ago, we were starting from a fairly good position. We’ve experienced steady growth in transactions through our cloud platform since the start, and it was in early 2014 we started switching over our architecture from a clustered monolithic JEE instance, to distributed microservices (see my previous article).

We needed to do this, in order to scale out our system horizontally, and handle the increasing traffic. One of the other benefits of microservices though, is you can deploy services independently of one another, and if you do it right, you can deploy new code without stopping traffic to the site.

“One of the other benefits of microservices, is you can deploy services independently of one another.”

FROM MONTHLY SERVICE WINDOWS ON SUNDAYS…

Our old monthly release cycle was based on having a ‘service window’, usually on a Sunday morning, where we could stop all the traffic, take a backup of the database, roll out the new version of the monolith, then bring everything back up again. You’ve got the database backup to fall back on, if something goes wrong with the update. You can easily roll everything back to the state it had before the service window.

…TO SEVERAL ROLLOUTS A WEEK

So of course, initially the microservices we had were fairly peripheral to the main function of our platform, and it wasn’t a huge risk to roll out new code without the safety of a service window. So we built deployment tools that allowed us to do that. All our microservices run with at least two instances, so an update consisted of taking each instance down in turn, replacing it with the new version. If something goes wrong, it’s not hard to roll back to a previous version. It’s a little more problematic to restore previous state, but generally we have good mechanisms to re-submit failed transactions once the service is working again.

So these days we roll out new versions of our microservices several times a week, when new features are ready, and rarely have any difficulties with this. The need to roll back does occur occasionally, but more often we can ‘roll-forward’ and deploy a newer version with a fix.

“These days we roll out new versions of our microservices several times a week, when new features are ready.”

MANY REASONS TO CONTINUE ON THIS PATH

With our former monolith, the situation is a little different though. Any changes that touch the database are deemed too risky to deploy without first taking a backup, and that currently requires a service window. We’ve got so used to frequently pushing out new versions of the microservices, and seen the benefits of that, that we’d like to do the same with the former monolith.

We also have good business reasons for wanting to release without having a service window – for a start our traffic is growing at such a rate, we can ill afford any downtime. Perhaps more importantly, as we get customers in more parts of the world, a Sunday morning is no longer a ‘quiet’ time of the week when it’s relatively ok to suspend our service. In some Arab countries where we do business, Sunday is the first day of the working week.

THE SHIFT TO CONTINUOUS DELIVERY HAS STARTED

Now we’ve gained some experience with Continuous Delivery of our microservices, it’s time to do the same with the whole Pagero Online platform, including our old monolith. So I look forward to being able to soon report that we’ve got the dials going all the way up to 10 and we are deploying any part of our system at any time.