Integrating APM into Your Testing Strategy
Editorial note: I originally wrote this post for the Stackify blog. You can check out the original here, at their site. While you’re there, have a look at their tooling to help you with your APM needs.
Does your team have a testing strategy? In 2017, I have a hard time imagining that wouldn’t at least have some kind of strategy, however rudimentary. Unlike a couple of decades ago, you hear less and less about people just changing code on the production server and hoping for the best.
At the very least, you probably have a QA group, or at least someone who serves in that role prior to shipping your software. You write the code, do something to test it, and then ship it once the testers bless it (or at least notate “known issues”).
From there, things probably run the gamut among those of you reading. Some of you probably do what I’ve described and little more. Some of you probably have multiple pre-production environments to which a continuous integration setup automatically deploys builds. Of course, it only deploys those builds assuming all automated unit, integration and smoke tests pass and assuming that your static analysis doesn’t flag any show stopper issues. Once deployed, a team of highly skilled testers perform exploratory testing. Or, maybe, you do something somewhere in between.
But, whatever you do, you can always do more. In fact, I encourage you always to look for new ways to test. And today I’d like to talk about an idea for just such a thing. Specifically, I think you can leverage application performance management (APM) software to help your testing efforts. I say this in spite of the fact that most shops have traditionally taken advantage of these tools only in production.
