Most software companies struggle with releasing quality code that doesn't break critical user workflows.
Companies invest significant dollars in testing their product to counter this but often ship a P0 bug anyway.
Here are 5 root causes for software bugs.
#1 Inconsistent Testing Environments
A common mistake and often a harder one to fix during the nascent phases of software.
Naturally, if the pre-production environment never hits an edge case that can occur in production, it is impossible to validate enhancements accurately.
Thought: Deploy a snapshot of the production environment as a pre-release environment.
#2 Backwards Incompatibility
Engineering teams write code to work in the "present" and the "future", making version testing hard. Software should not be forward-facing.
Example: Release #1 deploys software with a v1 dependency, and release #2 now uses a v2 version of the dependency. This change is non-idempotent - we wipe out a variable value by storing only the latest state.
What happens to the deployed state that works with a v1 dependency? Does it break or work with the new release?
Thought: Always support X states of existing data. Streamline rollbacks.
#3 Treating Infrastructure and Microservices Separately
As more folks campaign for infrastructure as code, we move towards automating infrastructure deployments.
But does a change in automation break existing infrastructure?
Thought: Can backward compatibility testing solve this problem?
#4 Ignoring the Network
Assuming the network behaves the same irrespective of time and region is a recipe for software failure.
Thought: Can Edge Testing gauge pre-release software inconsistencies?
#5 Testing Features in Silos
With the microservices architecture, a change in one service can cause a failure in unrelated user functionality. Testing a new release in a silo for a fixed subset of features doesn't help.
Thought: Replay tests for all critical user workflows for every release to generate an accurate failures heatmap.
Let me know if you've solved any of these mistakes and how.
Until later! :)
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