"A Unit Test Would Have Caught This:" Small, Cheap, and Effective Testing for Production Engineers

Production Engineers write tons of code for automating and managing distributed systems, ranging from one-off shell scripts to complex frameworks of many thousands of lines. But, in our profession, formal software testing has historically been weak. While there are a wide variety of ways to test software, in this talk, we'll focus on the methods that are easiest to implement and give the best results.

We'll discuss how teams use "small and cheap" tests at Facebook to give us the largest quality improvements with the lowest effort. Examples will include projects written in Bash and Python, as well as our Chef code, which is written in Ruby. We'll also discuss some of the ancillary benefits of testing, including recruiting, training, and team continuity.