Agile, Architecture and the 5am Production Problem

Agile, Architecture and the 5am Production Problem: “Functional testing falls short, however, when you want to build software to survive the real world. Functional testing can only tell you what happens when all parts of the system are behaving within specification. True, you can coerce a system or subsystem into returning an error response, but that error will still be within the protocol! If you’re calling a method on a remote EJB that either returns ‘true’ or ‘false’ or it throws an exception, that’s all it will do. No amount of functional testing will make that method return ‘purple’. Nor will any functional test case force that method to hang forever, or return one byte per second.”