Yes, I love this approach, when we reach high scale we are surely going to take a similar approach
That is awesomely cool but a lot of work to setup. For smaller companies not worth the effort.
Re:Do you smoke test?
by gatherknwldg on Friday February 22, 2013 @06:46AM
(#5263802)
> not worth the effort
Until it is, of course. Growing up is hard.
Don't release to the world. Release to 1%, then 5% then 20%... and so on. And if the load time starts going up, or the # errors start going up, or numerous other things - last release gets rolled back and alarms ring.
That way I don't break the world - I break a much smaller N% of the world that demonstrates the problem - which then promptly gets rolled back by the friendly neighbourhood release bots.
I write sucky code - so I write tests to help drive my design and catch errors.
But tests are code too - and I write sucky code - so I write release processes[1] they help save me when I write sucky test code.
If you do continual delivery you need that second layer of metric-driven tracking of release quality or writing sucky test code will catch you out at some point ;-)
[1] and yes - the release ramp up / roll back code is potentially sucky code also - but it's just one bit that does one thing so gets tested a lot more than all the new sucky code I write ;-)