Have you ever had a friend who was OCD about the whiteness of their teeth? They go to a cosmetic dentist for a laser whitening, then complain that it’s not white enough?
Eventually they reach an asymptotic point where the surface of the tooth can’t reflect 99.9% of the light, so getting a treatment that delivers 99.999% white teeth would be too costly — and impossible.
Test engineers, performance testers, and SREs are obsessed with achieving a five nines (or sometimes, even higher) level of reliability at the last mile of software delivery, where it impacts customers the most.
If you, too, have OCD about application reliability, you already worked out the math, and realized 5 9’s equates to about 5.26 minutes of downtime per year, total. And you also realize that the test engineering cost and effort of pushing past 99.9% to guarantee 99.999% uptime is monumental.
Getting production from 3 9’s to 5 9’s will eat up way more IT budget than getting to 3 9’s in most cases!
It seems all the preproduction performance testing in the world will never possibly clear up all of the unknown conditions that might cause the 0.001% of downtime. No matter how much we spend. Out, damned spot!
Ah… but let’s not worry about that one thing you can’t improve, all the way over on the right side of software delivery. No, no, no… Why not leave production alone for a while and go hang out with the DevTest teams at the beginning of the software lifecycle instead?
Over here on the left side of software delivery, they’re drawing maps, writing code, and picking components. Not a care in the world. No fears about what unknown unknowns might happen in deployment…
> Read the full article on the Parasoft Blog here: https://blog.parasoft.com/non-functional-testing-and-performance-testing-couldnt-get-any-more-shifted-left
©2020 Intellyx, LLC. Intellyx retains editorial control over the content of this document. At the time of writing, Parasoft is an Intellyx customer. None of the other vendors mentioned here are Intellyx clients. Image sources: Steve Snodgrass, Kristopher Volkman, John Queen, Gauthier DELECROIX – 郭天, flickr open source.
