Revisiting the concept of testing
So, why do we need testing and, more specifically, why would we want to automate it? A lot of the ideas that have been proposed for network automation have their roots in software engineering, so it is worth having a brief look at how modern software is developed and deployed on a continuous basis. When developing software, most engineers go through four basic phases, outlined as follows:
- The development stage is where the code is first designed and then written.
- The testing stage is where the code that has been written is tested extensively.
- The deployment stage is where the code that has been developed and tested is deployed to the servers.
- The monitoring stage is where data such as access times, occurring errors, and load on the system of the new change is closely monitored. Any insights that have been identified in the monitoring stage (such as the need to optimize a certain portion of the code) are fed back into the next development...