TiP is misunderstood – perhaps DDQ is Better

I spent a long time talking to folks about the merits of a conscientious Testing in Production (TiP) strategy.  But I knew TiP had a bad rap.  I even shared the story of how some would mischaracterize it as a common and costly technical malpractice

While evangelizing TiP, I and my Microsoft colleagues would happily post this picture wherever we could

Yet I knew the original poster was not so enthused with TiP.   Comments on TiP were supposing this was not a conscientious and risk-mitigated strategy, but instead devs behaving badly:

Then blame all issues on QA -_-

That’s our motto here. Doesn’t work to well in practice, actually.

Now I have returned to Amazon after spending 6 years at Microsoft.  From the following it looks like I have some education to do.

On the other hand, who can argue with Data-Driven Quality (DDQ).  (Except maybe a HiPPO).  DDQ is also more expansive than TiP, leveraging all data streams whether from production, customer research, or pre-release engineering.  So TiP was fun, but DDQ is the future.