DeveloperWeek Austin 2018

Imagine a world where a software engineer is truly responsible for the code they write; from the development, testing, deployment, to post-production monitoring. Maintaining and curating an integration test suite takes a lot of work, even for an experienced quality assurance (QA) team. Airbnb decided to deviate from the norm of employing designated QA team, and instead built a system to prioritize end-to-end ownership of features by product engineers. Engineers are responsible for all of these things, including having to be “at the ready” 24/7/365 for any problem associated with their feature or product. In Airbnb’s case, this is the preferred initiative because in most cases, the engineer making changes to the product has the most incentive and context to investigate, or triage a failure. Without a QA team, the engineering team at Airbnb has been able to organically build a test suite that has caught hundreds of regressions per month. In this session, we will share best practices and pitfalls we learned along the way, including: 1. Owning your own impact and the engineering culture at Airbnb. 2. An overview of our test infrastructure and what powers this system behind the scenes. 3. Features of our in-house test harness, and how it helped us scale it for an engineering organization of 1000+ engineers. 4. Determine what matters, how to get the most your tests with the least amount of work.