Bol’s journey in shifting left* and shifting right**: our Vision | Blog | bol.com

*) in full isolation, counting on stubs and stub containers **) totally built-in pre-production surroundings ***) experiment with new cloud elements, community or permission adjustments

On this put up we’ll describe how that imaginative and prescient appears to be like and why we consider in it, and in subsequent posts we’ll share extra about its key components.

The Imaginative and prescient

In 2021, lots of our groups have been nonetheless counting on a completely built-in pre-production (STG in additional textual content) surroundings to validate their adjustments. They anticipated dependencies to be up and working, and production-like information to be current throughout the surroundings. They anticipated the chain to be obtainable and dependable.

Nevertheless, technological adjustments, information, privateness and entry constraints imposed by at all times increasing laws meant that guaranteeing a secure STG surroundings with constant information throughout purposes was now not an affordable expectation. It was time to vary. Time to evolve.

We realised that the primary key part of our future imaginative and prescient is TESTING IN ISOLATION for each useful and non-functional assessments.We really consider that by making a severe push for this shift left, groups will have the ability to ship quicker and with confidence.

Nevertheless, this doesn’t come with out prices. Stipulations for profitable testing in isolation are:

• Creating stubs is straightforward
• Stubs are dependable.

This made us realise that we are able to’t have 170+ groups begin writing their stub implementations for occasionally as many as 10 dependencies their software depends on. It additionally grew to become clear that the accountability of offering dependable and reliable stubs ought to lie with the producers. We would have liked a solution to have automation take over these handbook and error susceptible steps whereas ensuring the stubs are a reliable illustration of an software.

Adopting an API-FIRST method to improvement the place APIs are thought-about first-class residents relatively than a know-how to combine sub-systems was an essential step in realising this. API design-first allows groups to innovate quicker through the use of CODE GENERATION to supply shopper/server code, mocks, and stubs. The standard of the generated code depends upon the standard of the API, which is the place API LINTING performs an essential function. API linting will assist the creation of high-quality APIs that may then be a stable base for code technology. This fashion the error susceptible handbook work will probably be automated away permitting our engineers to concentrate on delivering worth for our prospects.

These three elements symbolize the steps we’re taking to shift left.