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Melissa Benua

Melissa Benua
PlayFab, Inc.

Now a senior backend engineer for PlayFab, Melissa Benua has worked in nearly every software development role—engineer, test, DevOps, and program management—in her career. She's created and run high-availability, high-quality services at Boeing and Microsoft on products such as Bing, Cortana, and Xbox One. Melissa discovered her love of massively-scaled systems while working on the Bing backend, where she honed the art of keeping highly-available complex systems up while undergoing massive code churn. Whether working with classic or cutting-edge testing models, Melissa isn’t afraid to mix traditional approaches with bold new ideas to make her products better, faster, and more reliable.

Speaker Presentations
Thursday, October 1, 2015 - 1:30pm
Test Techniques
Integration Testing as Validation and Monitoring

In the world of software-as-a-service, just about anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection can spin up their very own cloud-based web service. Software startups, in particular, are often big on ideas but small on staff. This makes streamlining the traditional develop-test-integrate-deploy-monitor pipeline critically important. Melissa Benua says that an effective way to accomplish this is to reduce the number of different test suites that verify many of the same things for each stage. Melissa explains how teams can avoid this by authoring the right set of tests and using the right frameworks. Drawing on lessons learned in companies both large and small, Melissa shows how teams can drastically slash time spent developing automation, verifying builds for release, and monitoring code in production—without sacrificing availability or reliability.