Here's why you'd better test your website in production

Let's start with an observation

I've been working in the IT industry for a few years now, creating and helping to create many applications, and I've noticed something: no matter how good your development is, or how much testing you do, there always comes a time when things go wrong.

When your application goes offline overnight, it's usually pretty simple: you have to find the source of the problem and fix it (which can be a bit of an effort, I admit).

But, when only certain parts of your application go down, that's usually when it gets tough. And I think I've found the reason for this: as developers, we too rarely test our applications after they go live.

But why does this happen?

Indeed, manual testing is usually an extra workload that we often only do once, after our product has been delivered. But when it comes to day-to-day quality assurance, it's often more complicated.

"We too often rely on the shoulders of others (or even our users) to let us know when something goes wrong."

This can be seen in the tools we use to ensure the quality of our software. They are often:

• either focused on the development phase (via unit tests)
• or on monitoring, from a technical point of view (log analysis, exception raising, ...)

However, what counts for our users is generally quite different: it is the finished product, the functionality of the interface.

Hence the importance of production testing

This is where production testing comes in. Often neglected, this is a practice I want to encourage in this post: if you know how to do it, create synthetic tests, simulate the interaction of your users with your different features, and run them periodically: you will see much faster when something goes wrong.

These tests don't have to be very numerous and don't take much time to develop, but they can be vitally important.

You don't even need to have advanced skills in testing frameworks and tools. There are many applications, SAAS or otherwise, that will allow you to add these tests, which will guarantee much better stability to your applications.

A small promotional note

Based on this observation, I decided to add my own contribution by creating my own website monitoring tool. It's called Nodown (I let you understand the etymology of the name), and its purpose is precisely to create this kind of test. Of course, you can also do it by yourself with scripts or other SAAS software, but if you want to try it, you are welcome (just go to https://nodown.io) ;)