The Benefits Of Testing In Production

Everyone knows that businesses are becoming more agile

. A recent survey found that 40% of the organizations polled have at least one release cycle per month, which represents a dramatic shift from the days of legacy applications ten years ago, which may have rolled out new code a couple times a year. It is widely acknowledged that agile development is catching on, and many visionaries have offered their input on what it means and how best to go about it, but no one is talking about the business impact of agile.

In the same survey, one in three of the organizations that said they were agile also said that they experience a Severity 1 incident every month. While some of these may be unrelated to the release of new code into production, the correlation between monthly code releases and monthly outages is unmistakable. New code, no matter how it tested in pre-prod, always brings an element of uncertainty into a production environment. The more often you put new code into production, the more likely you are to experience performance problems that impact your end user and your bottom line.

At the heart of this problem is the assumption held by most developers that pre-prod is a passable imitation of prod. This is almost never the case. For a variety of reasons the production environment is impossible to simulate, and code that performs well in test may very well break your app in prod.

So whats the solution? Test in prod. Testing in pre-prod and development isnt enough; web application performance testing must occur in production too. Without collecting performance data in a production environment, you become vulnerable to problems that cause Severity 1 issues.

Now imagine if you did test in both dev and prod. Your deployment plan might look something like this:

Midnight: Deploy new code

12:15am Start load test

1:15am Stop load test

1:30 Analyze results from load test (IT infrastructure monitoring necessary to analyze health of infrastructure)

2:00am Ops makes a decision to continue or roll back

9:00am Dev analyze resulst from the load test, using some form of J2EE monitoring to see how the code performed in production, and what needs to be fixed.

This might sound like a lot of work. With some tools setting up load tests can be time-consuming, and production monitoring in an agile environment can be a constant pain. You must choose your tools carefully, but the right solutions are out there. With the right software, this whole process would only take about an hour to set up.

With this kind of testing cycle, the dreaded Severity 1 issues would be much easier to predict and avoid, no matter how agile your release cycle may be. Test in pre-prod, but test in production too agile is here to stay, and its time to change your testing strategy to cope with it.

by: joseph

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