Testing is the 10th Circle of Hell 🔥

... and what to do about it

TESTING IS THE 10th CIRCLE OF HELL In Dante's Inferno, Dante relates his experience observing "the nine circles of hell", each a horrific description of punishment matched perfectly to the deadly sins. I'm convinced that if Dante were our contemporary, he'd include a 10th circle of hell wherein the careless were forced to manually test code and configurations for all eternity. WHY DO WE TEST? We aspire to the purity of the production system. In our ideal, having new bugs reach production is the deadliest sin, because - mistakes can cause catastrophic failures in process- fixing issues in prod requires an entire dev cycle - you either spend time undoing damage, or live with damage that can't be repaired. THE PRIMITIVE PARADIGM For most in the ServiceNow world, testing is an entirely human endeavor. We "unit test" our new code, testing as best we can as devs, then pass to stakeholders for "User Acceptance Testing", then launch to prod without a full scale regression test. While this paradigm is by far the most common its fraught with hellish torment.- User Acceptance Testing should be about accepting the results of tests, not relying on stakeholders to perform the testing.- The stakeholders aren't trained testing resources. They have *better* things to do than test the things you're building.- The stakeholders won't suffer consequences if the deployment fails. That's all on you.- Stakeholders may not have access to test parts functions that the new configurations may influence.- The whole process requires monumental amounts of labor. Look at your last upgrade. You probably spent weeks/months testing whatever you could, delayed other work, and launched with undetected bugs anyway! A titan's workload for flimsy unreliable results THE PARADOX OF UNREALIZED HOPE Knowing the problem's scale, ServiceNow has poured R&D into ATF for a couple years. Why then is the primitive paradigm by far the norm?There's the paradox! ATF, awesome as it may be, currently gives the customer this choice:

Setting up ATF for the promise of a lower effort / better yield future, customers must commit to MASSIVE & ongoing labor building the ATF cases. If the labor wasn't necessary, true & robust automated testing via ATF would be the norm. But today, even the highlight reel success stories have dedicated up to 7 months of effort to get there! THERE IS A BETTER WAYIf you ask the Duke, ATF is awesome, but only solving half the problem. You want to execute full scale tests instantly, but you also can't spend your life just building tests. There MUST be something that assists the creation of ATF tests.

Enter Dotwalk.io, the makers of Bootstrap, an AI-powered test generator. Unlike competitors that replace/ignore OOB ATF functionality, Dotwalk's Bootstrap populates ATF for you based on your own usage patters. This provides some insane advantages.- Create tests based on what you *actually* do.- Capitalize on all future improvements to ServiceNow ATF.- Let your ServiceNow resources to focus on harder problems.- Automatically adapt to new usage patters. Most importantly, Bootstrap SAVES MONTHS OF MANUAL LABOR. Think about it: radically reduce production failures by testing at scale, for a *fraction* of the labor cost of testing or building test cases manually. Did You Enjoy This Content?Taking my content survey helps me navigate what to create.If you'd like to sponsor my content, reply to this message for options & rates.If you get tremendous value, consider a donation. If not, I still greatly appreciate your readership.If you or your team need a coaching session, book me on Superpeers. VICTORY through superior design and story telling friends. I remain yours truly, Robert "The Duke" Fedoruk Want to change how you receive these emails?You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

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