*) in complete isolation, based on stubs and stub containers **) fully integrated pre-production environment ***) experiment with new cloud components, network or permission changes
In this post we’ll describe what that vision looks like and why we believe in it, and in subsequent posts we’ll share more about its key elements.
The vision
In 2021, many of our teams were still relying on a fully integrated pre-production environment (STG in more text) to validate their changes. They expected dependencies to be up and running and production-like data to be present throughout the environment. They expected the chain to be available and reliable.
However, technological changes, data, privacy and access limitations imposed by ever-expanding regulations meant that ensuring a stable STG environment with consistent data across applications was no longer a reasonable expectation. It was time to change. It’s time to evolve.
We realized that the first key component of our vision for the future is INSULATION TESTS for functional and non-functional testing. We truly believe that by seriously driving this shift left, teams will be able to deliver faster and with confidence.
However, this is not without costs. The prerequisites for successful testing in isolation are:
- Creating slips is easy
- The heels are reliable.
This made us realize that we cannot allow 170+ teams to start writing their stub implementations for up to 10 dependencies that their application depends on. It was also clear that the responsibility for providing reliable and trustworthy safeguards should rest with producers. We needed a way for automation to take care of these manual, error-prone steps while ensuring that the stubs were a reliable representation of an application.
Adopting an API-FIRST development approach where APIs are considered first-class citizens rather than a technology for integrating subsystems was an important step in achieving this. API-first design allows teams to innovate faster by using CODE GENERATION to produce client/server code, mocks and stubs. The quality of the generated code depends on the quality of the API, which is where LINTING API plays an important role. API linking will help in the creation of high-quality APIs that can then be a solid foundation for code generation. This way, error-prone manual work will be automated, allowing our engineers to focus on delivering value to our customers.
These three components represent the steps we are taking to turn left.
