It's easy to talk about being agile, harder to do. Automated testing is a practical way to help enable agility in your infrastructure configuration.

1. Automated Configuration Testing, the Agile
Infrastructure Enabler
By Alan Sharp-Paul
OK, so I probably just closed out 100 games of Bullshit Bingo in the title of this blog post but I’ll
stand by it. You want actual agility in what you do? You need a safety net. That safety net is
automated testing.
I’ll be honest, most of my experience in this regard comes from my background as a developer.
When I started out, a fresh faced graduate at a funds manager in Sydney, I didn’t know much
about testing at all. Sure, I tested my code, but they were half arsed tests. I hadn’t even heard
the phrase “Unit Testing”. I got by though. I wasn’t an amazing technologist but I wrote pretty
good code and quality wasn’t something I worried about day to day.
Without being able to put it into words at the time though I did come to learn that quality by no
means enabled agility. Quite the opposite in fact. Lines and lines of code that worked well
became sacred sites. Don’t touch it! It works! In some cases it was better to be stuck with
crappy code that needed fixing. At least you were given license to have at it.
It was only much later when I got into Rails and started using Behaviour Driven
Developmentwith cucumber and rspec that I realised what I’d been missing. When every feature
you’ve coded is backed by tests you don’t just get quality, you get freedom, you can be agile.
You’re not afraid of refactoring you know is necessary. You can move quickly, iterate fearlessly.
That thing you always felt held you back, testing, is now super charging your work.
The same applies in the configuration space, and there are even more factors in play.
Configuration is a shared responsibility, with vested interests in development, operations,
security and beyond. The chance of a change here breaking a configuration there is greatly
increased. Worse still, whilst issues with code are more often than not clear to all through their

2. functional impact, a lot of issues with configuration are hard, or even impossible, to detect. Take
security or compliance considerations. How often are they cast aside in the interests of simply
getting something to work?
On top of that configuration is far more likely to be altered directly in production by sysadmins,
especially during a serious incident where a company is bleeding money. Without automated
testing how sure could you be that those quick fixes haven’t affected something else? If you
want that ability to be agile, to be able to react quickly with confidence then you need testing.
We automate our config though, you say. We have Puppet! We use Chef! That’s great, but what
are those manifests and recipes? They’re code. And from one dev to another, you gots to test
your code.
If you’re interested in finding out more about how ScriptRock can help you become more agile
with your infrastructure and configuration hit the Get Started button at the bottom of the page.