Mariya Herasymenko, 123RF
Introduction to behavior-driven monitoring
Fresh Approach
Any system administrator will be familiar with the situation: You monitor your system comprehensively, all of the services appear to work, and yet you see some anomalies in the graph for payment transactions. The access times for the payment systems have risen by a factor of 10. Manual testing of the components doesn't show any issues, and testing the metrics of the payment interface to the external service provider doesn't report any errors either.
After some intensive research, you finally find the evildoer: A bug in the middleware, which was updated last night, is preventing trouble-free fulfillment of payments. You roll back the release, and performance problems affecting payments are a thing of the past.
Agile Methods
To prevent incidents like this from becoming the norm, software developers often work with agile methods that have a considerable effect on the development process.
With this approach, the focus of development is no longer exclusively on programming activities but on comprehensive testing of the software as well as close cooperation with all of the project stakeholders. These working principles form the basis of "Test-Driven Development" and "Behavior-Driven Development."
The main idea behind test-driven development is to ensure that software doesn't just work but also behaves exactly the way the user expects it to work. To achieve this, automated test systems such as Jenkins [1] (formerly Hudson) or CruiseControl [2] are deployed to test specific features of the application regularly.
Behavior-driven development extends the principles of test-driven development by allowing non-programmers to participate in the process of software development. The focus is on the involvement of all project
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