Hey Perplexed, We’re huge advocates for testing in production, and that includes performing chaos engineering/continuous verification in production. But you’re right to want to be cautious about exactly how you are performing these tests. After all, it’s chaos engineering, not just pure unbridled chaos.

When it comes to the applications, websites, and services we build, the end user ultimately determines whether or not the end product is successful. Even the greatest concepts can fall short if the application does not consistently meet the evolving needs and expectations of the user. Just look at what happened to sites like Myspace or Yahoo.

Development is no longer a linear journey from point A to point B. As more projects shift into a state of organic growth, user feedback and constant experimentation are increasingly becoming the norm, if not the standard for engineering. “In order to support this rapid experimentation, we’re beginning to embrace new working methods and practices,” said Vinodh Ravi, Executive Director of Platform Engineering at JPMorgan Chase.

Performance is a vital component of user experience. Users will leave—and likely not come back—if your site is slow. If they stay, they’ll be less likely to buy from you if their experience is subpar. To add insult to injury, they’re even less likely to find your app to begin with, since Google punishes poorly-performing sites in the search results. To solve the problem of poor performance, knowledge of what impacts performance is essential.

Software is one of the most complex tools invented for practical use. One misplaced character can break an entire application. So, careful testing is an essential requirement before publishing any code. In this article, you will learn about two fundamental types of software testing, unit testing and integration testing, and how your team can implement them in your CI/CD pipelines to validate your code quickly and deliver new features to your users with confidence.

Performance testing is an essential component of building fast and reliable web services. Until recently, this testing typically happened later in the development process and was often performed by a separate team or even a third party. But speed is the competitive advantage for companies, and prioritizing testing during the development process can speed time to market for new applications.

While there is a lot of focus on the three pillars of observability to provide insight into application performance in production, load testing is the other side of the observability story. By using the open source load testing tool k6 — which Grafana Labs acquired earlier this year — developers can simulate real-world traffic to test the reliability and performance of software changes and new features, not to mention flag performance issues before impacting end users.