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Autonomous Testing and the Future of Software Development - Will Wilson

The Linux Foundation · 6.9K views · 2018-12-20 · 32:02

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Overview

Will Wilson explains autonomous testing: using deterministic simulation and fuzzing, building on FoundationDB's approach, to test software continuously. It sets out the ideas behind his later company Antithesis.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as an excellent talk on generalizing deterministic simulation testing, and Antithesis hiring posts link it to explain the work.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2019–2024

Topics

Testing, debugging & developer toolsDistributed systems
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autonomous testingfoundationdbfuzzingantithesis

What people said

georgelyon · 2024-02 · Strong recommendation

Congratulations to the Antithesis team! I actually interviewed with them when they were just starting, and outside of being very technically proficient, they are also a great group of folks. They flew my wife and I out to DC on what happened to be the coldest day of the year that year (we are from California) so we didn’t end up following through but I’d like to think there is an alternative me out there in the multiverse hacking away on this stuff. I highly recommend Will’s talks (which I believe he links in the blog post): [LINK] [VIDEO]

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georgelyon · 2020-07 · Strong recommendation

I very much agree with this sentiment, but it is difficult to endorse this line of reasoning without offering a better alternative. As folks have pointed out in other comments, there are other values to tests in the broad sense that the author doesn’t address. That said, if you are interested in improving the state of testing, I would encourage you to listen to Will Wilson’s excellent talk on the subject of Autonomous Testing: [VIDEO] Indeed, FoundationDB (which Wilson worked on) has a very unique and sophisticated approach to testing that seems to have served them very well.

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georgelyon · 2024-03 · Recommendation

Really unique product with a super-strong founding team! I’m not a working with them, but am cheering from the sidelines. One of the founders gives a great talk here: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by The Linux Foundation, played through YouTube.

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