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Value-Based Testing

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Wikipedia.com: Quality assurance (QA) refers to the planned and systematic activities implemented in a quality system so that quality requirements for a product or service will be fulfilled. It is the systematic measurement, comparison with a standard, monitoring of processes and an associated feedback loop that confers error prevention.

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What do they really do?

• Ensure proper functionality• Look for “big picture” issues• Large-scale testing (hopefully)• Identify edge cases• Advocate for user experience• Environment is volatile

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What do they really do?

DEV QA OPS

Old school process:• Throw code over the

wall• And run• Its Ops problem now

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What do they really do?

• Responsibility lines blurred• Collaboration required• Dev should be in escalation

path

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DEV

QA

OPS

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• New tools, scripts, jobs must follow release procedures

• Patches, PSUs, environment settings

• Can combine to test all at once• Monitoring must be tested

(verified) too

Ops changes also need QA

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But how?• Make identical environments

(i.e. not a laptop VM!)• Automation ensures repeatable

results, fewer mistakes• Two-way communications

– Ops takes input from QA– QA takes input from Ops

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Conducting Tests…Better• QA needs *real* info about

production• Session counts, workload

stats, response time• Apply load identical to prod

load.• When identical isn’t

possible, scale back, note risks

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More Tests• Operational tests – HA

failures, backups, stats gathering

• Avg load, peak load, crash load

• Load test with missing nodes, disks, NICs

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What did you do?• Record tests completed,

especially parameters• Keep performance

reports, AWR, capture ASH data, key exec plans

• Baselines = key, especially around upgrades

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Typical Challenges, Issues• Spend all the money on

prod, no $$$ for QA• Our staff is so skilled, we

don’t need a “real” QA• Our schedule slipped, so

we cut QA time down to 10% of the original plan

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Typical Challenges, Issues• We don’t have

requirements• Can’t you test it faster?• We don’t have a way to

simulate 500 users

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Answer to Typical Challenges• Me: What is the cost of downtime?• Mgmt: We aren’t sure…• Me: Let me take production down, then we can

measure.• Mgmt: On second thought, I think I can probably

estimate it pretty closely without an outage.

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War Stories

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Q & A• Any questions or comments, please contact:– Gwen Shapira• Email: cshapi@gmail.com• Twitter: @gwenshap

– Dan Norris• Email: dannorris@dannorris.com• Twitter: @dannorris

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