Diagnose before cure

New year, new episode. Mykola Gurov is the first guest of the year, and we challenge him with the heuristic “Diagnose before cure” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/diagnose-before-cure/). Mykola shares his opinion about observability and the importance to challenge our assumptions and bias. Focus on the purpose of the software rather than the technical details. We discuss testing in production, the different techniques to be effective, reduce the feedback cycle, and do it safely. We end up talking about the differences between traditional approaches to testing software versus modern ones.

Mykola recommends:

• Unit testing is overrated blog post by Alexey Gulob (https://tyrrrz.me/blog/unit-testing-is-overrated)
• Testing of Microservices blog post by André Schaffer (https://engineering.atspotify.com/2018/01/11/testing-of-microservices/)

Mykola (@ngurov) is a software engineer. Working at bol.com since 2015. Mostly within “feature delivery” teams (logistics, supply chain) with occasional detours towards platform development. He is a proponent and adopter of rapid feedback techniques in software development: thorough functional testing in development; progressive feature delivery and trunk-based development; testing on production (shadow and live). On the technical side, he is a believer in micro-services; preference for higher-tier testing instead of heavy use of mocks.