Using Test Automation to Drive Architectural Change

Have you ever worked with a large and complex codebase, limited automated test coverage, lengthening release cycles, and the danger of accumulating technical debt? It can be difficult to know where to begin, particularly when you have competing demands to spend time delivering new functionality. Two years ago our team realised we needed to modernize the architecture of one of our products, which would eventually involving refactoring the several hundred-thousand line codebase from a monolithic architecture to a distributed micro-service based deployment. In this talk I’ll share how we used test automation techniques to drive this transformation, and share lessons learnt as we redesigned both our software architecture and our development processes – allowing us to move from quarterly release cycles to a continuous delivery model.