The purpose of software testing is to reduce the risk of negative effects resulting from unexpected behaviors of your application at the lowest possible cost. So let’s talk about the various costs associated with testing code in cloud applications.

Why Is Continuous Integration (CI) Testing Important?

Testing during the continuous integration phase of the application development life cycle is a lifesaver: It enables you to fix problems even before they occur, which prevents production issues that would affect your end-users, customers, or your business. Additionally, testing lets you speed up the continuous delivery process and reduce integration failures.

Known Costs of CI Testing

Issues in production can be extremely costly, but no…

Software testing is the process of verifying a program or application to ensure that it performs as expected. It is an important part of the software development life cycle, as it can save teams from costly fixes. By understanding when and how to effectively run tests, a team will be able to avoid common pitfalls in the software development life cycle.

Software testing teams play a significant role in determining the success of a software product after development is completed — otherwise known as the pre-production stage.

That’s why the players of the software testing team should be highly talented…

If your business is thinking of switching over to an integration and continuous deployment/delivery (CI/CD) model of software production, the first thing you may wonder is whether this move is good for business. Migrating and training your team will take time and money, but sometimes it’s not clear what the payoff is and how and when you’re going to start seeing any ROI.

It’s reasonable to be cautious and not leap to embrace whatever the latest buzzword happens to be. But CI/CD has been around for the better part of 20 years and has proven its value as part of…

In the last article, we talked about some basic types of software bugs and how to find them. Every software project has gotten a bug at some point in its development, and every software developer has had to debug a project at some point in their career.

Some of these bugs are so common that fixing them is seen as a standard procedure of every software development process. But not all bugs fall in this category; some are elusive and can take weeks to find and finally fix. …

Identifying Software Bugs — Part 1

It’s been said that every line of code is a liability. We have to write code to create software, but every time we do we create the possibility of software bugs-or “bugs” for short. But what is a bug exactly?

A bug is something that is either entirely wrong or not quite right with software. It can lead to wrong outputs or behaviors, or even crash the whole system. The word bug was first used by Grace Hopper, when she taped an actual bug into the documentation she wrote about Mark II. In those days, computers used mechanical relays for…

The abundance of cloud services available today makes building web-scale products very accessible. Any company with sufficient resources can leverage infrastructure and platform services to build products that can serve thousands or even millions of customers. They can achieve economies of scale while providing a reliable service, without having to build everything from scratch.

However, hardware has its limits, and building a product at this scale inevitably requires a distributed architecture. Nowadays, this is usually made up of any number of microservices. This approach brings challenges of its own, from the realities of the CAP theorem (e.g., …

What Is Mocking?

Mocking is a popular and widely used approach in unit testing to handle dependencies. However, this method has both an upside and a downside, so it’s important to compare these pros and cons to determine if the costs will outweigh the benefits. Let’s take a closer look at mocking.

Mocking is a great way to isolate tests from external factors, like databases or web services. However, mocking also adds an extra layer of complexity to our codebase that must be carefully considered.

Avoid Log Fatigue: Debugging Smarter, Not Harder

Developers love their logging. Virtually every programming language lets you create additional output for your application in the form of logs. It’s an easy way to debug code and it’s understood even by junior developers. Logs tell you if a call to a certain method has failed if a specific line of code has been reached during execution, or when to get a local variable’s value.

And who could blame them? Virtually all tutorials for programming languages start with logging, so it comes as no surprise that developers resort to logs when things go wrong.

Many developers approach debugging by…