Testing

Testing may be one of the most controversial subjects in Airflow. In our opinion, this is likely due to people trying to take a dogmatic view of what is a pragmatic practice.

Put simply, testing should be about promoting trust that your deployment will operate in a consistent and predictable manner. While we will be giving some general advice (because we have scars that we’d prefer others not to have), we won’t claim that this is a golden or even complete path to success. When things break or outages occur (and they will), part of your retrospective process should be to include any additional tests to ensure that the problem doesn’t occur again in the future.

This pattern of test development means two things: your testing plan will inherently match your lived experience in operating Airflow and it will evolve over time as you mature.

Testing environments

Airflow is software that, due to its highly configurable nature, you will generally rebuild...