Developers conference 2022

The annual Developers conference was finally back in 2022 and it was in person! This time, I presented about the the strategies to improve the software development process to allow an organisation to scale in terms of teams, application usage, load and delivery.

Below is a summary of the topics that was discussed:

1. Improving the test mix to find bugs faster and earlier in the software development life cycle.

We discussed about how and when to use unit test, integration tests and UI tests. Also did a live demo of running unit tests off an Azure devops pipeline.

2. Automating load testing

Discussed and showcased the use of Gatlling and Jmeter to prepare load test cases and how to run them automatically and on a schedule via an Azure devops pipeline. This is critical to ensure any new code being written do not cause any performance degradation in the application. For example, if each team shipping a module write a perf test script with its performance benchmark. Then this series of tests is being run each day from the main or develop branch, any performance degradation will be flagged immediately.

3. Automating security testing

The next topic we discussed was the cost and time it takes to find and fix security vulnerabilities late in the development process or just before doing a release. Doing so, makes the team rush into fixes, generates tech and security debt and generally cause a lot of stress on the teams. To solve this, we discussed and demoes the use of OWASP dependency scanning, SonarQube security scan and OWASP Zap. And of course, I also demonstrated how to make those test run automatically via an Azure DevOps pipeline.

4. Infrastructure improvements

We then discussed about the use of Kubernetes for the deployment of the applications and how we used rolling updates to allow teams to deploy during the day without ay downtime

5. Observability

I also planned to discussed about Kibana and Azure application insights and how those are used to fire alerts so that our teams can fix issues proactively. Could not talk about it due to time constraints. Will park it for another event soon.

The full deck is available here: https://1drv.ms/p/s!ArEkiY6h4A6h2lyiCOzKUjEoamBp?e=SsdMbX

This session was packed with session and demos. I’ll write a post about each topic soon.