Company
Date Published
Author
Larry Loeb
Word count
1228
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Testing in production means that new code changes are tested on live user traffic rather than in a staging environment. This approach can improve the quality assurance process by ensuring that features work as expected in the real-world usage environment, eliminating the need for a separate staging area. By testing in production, Quality Assurance engineers can avoid wasting effort on setting up and maintaining a staging test environment, which is often difficult to replicate the actual use environment. Companies like Google, Netflix, and Amazon already use production testing as part of their DevOps practices. However, this approach requires that the production code affected by new changes is resilient enough to handle any testing-induced issues, and may add complexity if only a limited scope of code is being tested. Selenium and Appium are popular tools used for implementation, with Selenium being used for browser UIs and Appium for mobile apps. To implement TIP, developers can use utility classes to abstract away repetitive tasks and tests from drivers, making it easier to maintain and update the test repository.