TransferWise | UK

BIO: Andrei is an idealist who seeks to transform utopia into reality. He’s currently the Tech Lead of the Engineering Experience team at TransferWise. With over 13 years of experience, he has worked mainly for companies focused on agile methodologies and quality, like Dextra Sistemas and ThoughtWorks.

TALK: Tests at TransferWise: Challenges to test a system with more than 300 services

For decades we have been evolving strategies to test monolithic systems. The importance of concepts like the test pyramid was iterated over and over again. However, with the growing adoption of microservices, there’s a need to revisit these practices to adapt them to the complexity brought by distributed systems.

Based on the journey to migrate from a monolith to a microservice architecture at TransferWise, this talk intends to discuss the challenges faced while testing a system with more than 300 services and over 100 daily deployments. We will talk about techniques that we have been using, like Monitoring, Feature Toggles, Canary Releases, Contract Testing, and Testing in Production. We will also analyze why enterprise-wide staging environments are obsolete and possible alternatives, like on-demand testing environments.