π₯§ Pie mail - Exploring DORA metrics! π₯§
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Hello friends, it's pie-mail time again!
It's been a week. I want to open by acknowledging the COVID-19 situation in India at the moment. I know a few people who are directly affected by this, and I'm sure there are many of you receiving this email who are too.
It's really hard to know how to help in this situation, but I'd ask that if you have the means, please consider donating to help the recovery efforts.
Thank you!
Now, for your regularly scheduled content.
π This week I learned... π
...about DORA metrics!
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DORA stands for DevOps Research and Assessment, and is an organisation dedicated to studying the effectiveness and implementation of DevOps techniques.
DORA have come up with a set of four metrics you can use to assess your software delivery performance.
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Here's what they are, and why they're important to testing:
Lead Time
Lead time is the time taken from code committed to code running in production. It's important because the longer the lead time is, the longer we have to wait to see value from the change.
Also, if the lead time is long, the developer who worked on the change may have moved on to something else. If there's a problem, they may have to context switch back, be removed from other projects - or in an extreme case, they might even have left the company. That's a problem!
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Deploy frequency
Deploy frequency is how often we deploy to production. It's reasonable to suggest that a low frequency means more code changes in each release. Because if we don't release frequently, we're going to end up trying to squeeze as much into each release as we can. The bigger that release gets, the increased likelihood of problems, and the harder it becomes to track them down.
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Time to restore
When something bad happens, how long does it take to fix it? If it takes a long time to roll back to a previous version or restore a broken service, then every change becomes riskier. Problems will inevitably be exposed longer, to more users, and this could be catastrophic. "How long will it take us to fix this if it breaks" is an important question to ask during testing!
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Change fail percentage
What percentage of changes have bugs? I take this to mean, specifically, bugs that require action - rollback, hotfix, that sort of thing. If this is a high number, it can be an indicator of something missing in our testing process! Of course, this can never be zero, but ideally it is as low as possible!
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So, how does your organisation score on DORA metrics? Where could they improve, and how could improving these metrics improve the quality of your product?
β¨ Some interesting links β¨
Choose your own adventure: Debugging network puzzles
Julia Evans has put together these great 'choose your own adventure' style puzzles. They're fun, and it's a great way to learn about diagnosing network problems!
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Tester of the day
I had the joy of winning the "tester of the day" award this week! Tester of the Day is a daily award scheme organised by Ben Dowen, to celebrate the testing community. Do you know a great tester? Why not nominate them?
And thanks Melissa for the nomination!!
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How to build trust in your testing
Some good thought provoking content in this post from Maaret PyhΓ€jΓ€rvi. It's a short read, but it'll make you think. Worth your time!
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Practice your automation skills!
I know many people who read this email are looking for good websites and APIs to practice their automation skills. Kristin Jackvony has created a new contact list app for testing both UI and API automation. Go nuts!
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Security vulnerability - viewing someones private YouTube videos
David SchΓΌtz breaks down a security vulnerability he found in YouTube. Really interesting reading - don't get too excited though, they've fixed it already!
𧩠Puzzle time π§©
I have a page that contains an Iframe, it looks like this:
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But when I try and run an automated verification in Cypress, the Customer ID doesn't appear in the iFrame:
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Why isn't this working?
You'll need to view the code for the page, and the code for the iFrame to work it out.
You can also try and clone the repo and run it yourself.
Finally - what could you do to make this work? Does the test need fixing, or the page itself?
(I'll freely admit this is a bit of a contrived example, but it was an interesting learning regardless.)
πͺ Events coming up πͺ
Events for those of you in New Zealand:
Security Vision for DevOps: Seeing the Upside-Down (Auckland, May 12)
Ron Amosa is going to be talking about the relationship between Security and DevOps, and how DevOps processes can be viewed through a security lens.
It's going to be a great talk, and it's a chance to check out the fancy new Flux offices too. Don't miss it!
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Events for anyone anywhere!
RestAssured Workshop (May 5)
Ministry of Testing Auckland are hosting an online workshop on API test automation using RestAssured. A great skill to learn, and it'll only take a couple hours of your time!
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Cypress v Selenium (May 11)
Angie Jones and Colby Fayock are pitting Cypress and Selenium Webdriver in a head-to-head battle. Who will win? This should be a fun one!
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π Thanks for reading! π
As of this weekend, this newsletter is up to one hundred subscribers! I'm so happy! I hope that means you are finding it useful and telling people about it!
Thanks for all your support!
Take care, and reach out to me any time on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Cheers,
James a.k.a. JPie π₯§
βhttps://jpie.nzβ
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