Exploring systems quality in a distributed world

The days where testing at the application layer was our only concern are fading fast as we speed through the era of distributed systems, to containers, microservices, and now serverless architecture. Failures are becoming more and more transient throughout this evolution and we are in need of better visibility to have any hope of understanding and supporting them. Visibility can be spoken about on a spectrum of “observability” which is defined in control theory as “a measure of how well internal states of a system can be inferred from knowledge of its external outputs.”

In this 2-day workshop we will explore the behaviours and challenges of a distributed system through the lens of observability. Your experiences in exploratory testing and passion for testability will be applied to new domains including distributed tracing, logging and metrics. Your risk heuristics will be exposed to new challenges like balancing the CAP theorem and the challenge of gaining information from a sea of big data.

By the end of our day together, attendees will:

- Be able to explain what Observability is and why it is valuable

- Understand how Observability can support testing in a continuously changing environment

- Have experience working with a fully open source and a vendor neutral technology stack

- Apply exploratory testing skills to a new technical domain