Shift right – testing in production
If you start with automated testing, you rapidly see improved quality and a decline in the debugging effort of your engineers. But at some point, you must increase the effort tremendously to see a significant impact on quality. On the other hand, the time your tests need to execute slows down your release pipeline, especially if you add performance tests and load tests to the mix (see Figure 12.7):
Figure 12.7 – The impact of testing effort on quality and velocity
It's impossible to release multiple times a day if your pipeline runs for more than 24 hours! The increased execution time of your pipeline also reduces your ability to roll forward quickly and deploy a fix if a bug occurs in production.
The solution to this is simple: shift right some of the tests to production. All the tests that you run in production do not impact your ability to release fast, and you don't need performance or load...
