I heard a great example of global misunderstanding yesterday in a discussion about testing at scale for “big data” type systems. It was claimed, and I accept for the purpose of this post, that you couldn’t test an application that took 5-hours on 20,000 servers, maybe so.

However, if the data was considered personal information under most western economies privacy laws, that meant you couldn’t test against production data anyway. So you go live without testing or have to have a process to anonymise the data before you test on it. Then there’s the 20,000 server problem…

So in the spirit of test is production, since the oldest entry in this new blog is from 2004 where I was using my, then new smartphone, a Palm Tungsten W to post over the internet’s, this is today’s equivalent. I’m using a Dell Venue Pro with Windows Phone 7.5 via the t-mobile GSM network. testing, testing, 123…