Observability Engineering

Chapter 11. Observability-Driven Development

As a practice, observability fundamentally helps engineers improve their understanding of how the code they’ve written is experienced by end users (typically, in production). However, that should not imply that observability is applicable only after software is released to production. Observability can, and should, be an early part of the software development life cycle. In this chapter, you will learn about the practice of observability-driven development.

We will start by exploring test-driven development, how it is used in the development cycle, and where it can fall short. Then we’ll look at how to use observability in a method similar to test-driven development. We’ll examine the ramifications of doing so, look at various ways to debug your code, and more closely examine the nuances of how instrumentation helps observability. Finally, we’ll look at how observability-driven development can shift observability left and help speed up software delivery to production.

Test-Driven Development

Today’s gold standard for testing software prior to its release in production is test-driven development (TDD). TDD is arguably one of the more successful practices to take hold across the software development industry within the last two decades. TDD has provided a useful framework for shift-left testing that catches, and prevents, many potential problems long before they reach production. Adopted across wide swaths of the software development ...