SQGNE talk on Nov 8

I go to the Software Quality Group of New England talks sometimes. I was originally a little disappointed in this one Avoid Embarrassing Deployments To Guarantee Continuous Availability, I was expecting to hear advice about preventing regressions from getting deployed, and what I got was a description of the tools one company uses to try to do that.

Then I thought more about it, and decided that the speaker was taking it for granted that the advice was “have a good set of automated regression
tests, run them early and often”, and “you need to know how good your tests are, and what is and is not currently broken, and what the trends are”. If your response to that is “I wish I had that information”, you might be daunted by the prospect of getting it. He was showing us that an organization can get all that information, it isn’t that hard, you need tools like this and this and this, and you put them together. Here’s a working example.

Sometimes that’s the kick someone needs in order to start solving a problem for their own environment.