Seems Good Enough to Me: Working with Testers to Derisk Elixir Upgrades

Jenny Bramble came up through support and DevOps, cutting her teeth on that interesting role that acts as the ‘translator’ between customer requests from support and the development team before diving headlong into her career as a tester. Her love of support and the human side of problems lets her find a sweet spot between empathy for the user and empathy for her team. She’s done testing, support, or human interfacing for most of her career. She finds herself happiest when she’s making an impact on other people–whether it’s helping find issues in applications, speaking at events, or just grabbing coffee and chatting.

It’s that time again! You have a legacy app running business-critical functions, and it’s on an old version of Elixir. You need to upgrade to stay safe, have access to the most modern features of the ecosystem, and be current with your community. But a full regression of the app will take days, if not weeks, and no one can find the time. What’s a team to do?

Jenny Bramble suggests leaning on the deep magic of test methodology and collaboration to determine the minimum viable tests to run in order to ensure your system is performing as expected. She’ll talk about working through release notes with your testers as well as applying test methodologies to the types of problems we see in upgrades and regressions. You’ll walk away from this talk with a stronger understanding of the ways we can simplify and derisk upgrades and a structure for working with tests to make sure that we’re doing the right amount of testing.