Improving Engineering Quality: Key Insights from a Recent Workshop

Last week I was in Helsinki for a workshop around the topic of “Quality” for a global leader in supply chain planning.

Some of the main ideas to improve were:

• Establishing long-lived customer environments for consistent testing
• Enhancing visibility into user behavior

Some of the main challenges we discussed were:

• Tests currently don’t reflect actual customer usage patterns
• Limited integration tests and datasets that are too small
• Lack of a complete view of how users interact with our application
• Insufficient visibility into user actions before an error occurs

This article from The New Stack relates to several key points raised in the workshop:

• Traceability with end-to-end correlation between logs, enabling us to trace a user’s actions across various services
• Maintaining a realistic, always-available test environment

The article goes even further, discussing data isolation and implementing multiple sandboxes (isolated environments within the same infrastructure). I suspect that this approach may already be feasible or even previously requested by our customer.