Why Test Driven Development works for SysAdmins

SeaGL 2015 Oct 23 at 13:00

This talk would be largely technology agnostic and would focus on demonstrating the value of TDD to SysAdmins. This topic was requested of me for LISA last year and it would be great to get this message out at a forum like SeaGL that is focused on the community.

• Why test?
  • Confidence
  • Fast feedback
  • Matrix testing
  • Test multiple OS’s with deploying it everywhere
  • Prevent regression
  • Design specs (even in an agile world)
• Why test first?
  • Focus on the end goal, not the steps involved
  • Document functionality that you care about
  • Forces you to think about the design
  • Save time by building minimum viable product
  • You can refactor later
• What to test?
  • Data inputs
  • Conditional logic
  • Failure occurs when expected
  • The system as it is consumed
• Tools
  • GitHub
  • Travis-ci
  • Jenkins
  • Vagrant
• Monitoring
  • That’s how SysAdmins test now
  • Use it in pre-production
  • Feedback loop to improve monitoring through testing

Presenters