Serena Gray's Blog

So what exactly is DevOps? Let's take a small hypothetical example to illustrate. Let us say there's a small startup that assembles AI-enabled cleaning robots. There are 3 programmers (let's be lazy and simply call them Team D) who compose and execute the code to produce the robots and 2 operational people (Team O of course) who maintain the robot infrastructure in the real-world environment and supply aid for the robot consumers. Team D has only spent 8 months producing the latest robot. It can recognize individuals, take orders from Alexa devices, and clean like a boss. Team D has spent time producing this robot into their controlled dev environment and everything seems to be working smoothly. They couldn't be prouder. They hand over their production to Team O that immediately takes it out to the real world. That's when the problems start. It turns out that the perfect cleaning robot isn't so perfect after all. It does not recognize everybody, it can follow Al...

Let's start by saying that integration testing is looking for information on how two systems work together. That's a little vague, right? A system could be nearly anything. APIs send and get data from databases. That could be entire software products working together like TweetDeck and Twitter. An integration test can be performed anywhere there is a  coupling  between two software systems. When that coupling is broken, software becomes a black hole. Customers can submit forms and send data all they want, but it doesn't do any good. FedEx doesn't know that Amazon has packages ready to be shipped from the warehouse to customers that have already paid. Insurance companies can't make decisions about which parts of a healthcare bill they should cover for their customers.  It is easy for a tester to get a sort of blindness during a release cycle. New features come in one at a time, and sometimes one piece at a time. Testing happens at a granular level. First the  API get...