Engineering war stories and lessons learned in 2016

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43 pointsprabhatjha4 comments

> We had a TDA (Test Driven Apocalypse) where our CI builds had crept up to 20 minutes, tests were failing randomly and development speed was at an all time low. It was extremely demoralizing waiting 15-20 minutes and getting a random test failure. We called it The Roulette.

Not enough info about the exact nature of the problem, but if the issue was too many acceptance tests (as evidenced by long duration and intermittent failures), the solution is the Test Pyramid: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TestPyramid.html

OP here.

I'm glad you shared that article! I didn't know about the Test Pyramid concept. I'll share this with my team.

You're right, a part of the issue was that we had too many acceptance tests.

"Don't deploy on Fridays, FULL STOP." - Fixed it for you

Hahaha, much better!

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