Two weeks into DevOps

It has now been two weeks since the start of my new DevOps role in a tech start-up company. It hasn't been too bad. It has certainly been interesting new work and job satisfaction to go with it.

The first week was essentially spent getting to know the environment, tools and the way of working. Very typical of an agile start-up company, the way we did it was to be assigned on an important and urgently needed to be completed project. And of course the way we attempted the project was using DevOps tools - Ansible, VMs and Git. However, any other tools we needed and the way we did it was open for adoption and discussion with a flexible but pragmatic approach.

The overarching philosophy that is constantly influencing is a test driven approach. This approach has been adopted a lot readily in software or application development and wholly in extreme programming, but I am certainly unsure how we adopt this approach in DevOps, especially with regards to the ops or system side of implementation. The difficulty arises with we are implementing something completely new and those tests have not been established or even thought about as we have not developed anything to test!

However, this graphic found on Wikipedia gives a clue to how this TDD might pan out with our first project.

The idea is that we quickly knock up a solution. Then quick knock up tests for that solution. Then subsequently improve the solution using the failed tests and then improve the tests that will improve the solution! Hmmmm... Not sure, maybe you can advise. The other main issue with no established working patterns and tests is that we don't want to spend more time establishing the testing infrastructure for our project than actually working on the project!

How fast can we implement a Test Kitchen for our project? https://dantehranian.wordpress.com/2015/06/18/testing-ansible-roles-with-test-kitchen/