Chapter 5. Testing and Releasing

This chapter could easily be two books, as testing and releasing are both very complex fields. There are folks, who refer to themselves as software test engineers and release engineers, who specialize in both these fields. The two topics are very closely integrated when it comes to reliability. They form the first layer of preventative reliability. While Chapter 2, Monitoring and Chapter 3, Incident Response were about reacting to the current state and Chapter 4, Postmortems was all about looking back, this chapter focuses on looking into the future.

Testing and releasing are processes that are often set up early in a project and then are forgotten. Many engineers assume that tests will just run and code can be released. However, processes that are built for a few engineers don't necessarily scale to larger teams. For projects that last a long time (years for example), improving the releasing and testing process is often ignored until...