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# Startup Presentation: Observability-driven development with OpenTelemetry

Are passing tests masking silent failures in your microservices? Discover how observability-driven development with OpenTelemetry replaces unreliable mocks with real distributed traces to catch bugs before production.

- **Speakers:** Adnan Rahić
- **Event:** 
- **Published:** August 22, 2024
- **Duration:** 3:37
- **URL:** https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1179-startup-presentation-observability-driven-development-with-opentelemetry

## Summary

Distributed applications running across Kubernetes, microservices, and serverless architectures often struggle with silent failures, even when standard unit and integration tests pass. Traditional testing methods treat these complex systems as black boxes, making it difficult to pinpoint errors in asynchronous processes like external APIs or message queue workers.

By leveraging OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing alongside Trace Test, engineering teams can adopt observability-driven development. This approach effectively uses distributed traces as a core component of the testing strategy. Instead of relying on mocks or fakes, developers trigger a test and use the resulting distributed trace to create assertions directly against both the response and the underlying trace data.

This methodology enables teams to identify the root causes of failures—such as an external API dropping a request before it reaches the database—long before they impact production. Ultimately, observability-driven development bridges the gap between monitoring and testing, allowing developers to test against real data and succeed by "quite literally observing the system as it is."

**Keywords:** observability-driven development, opentelemetry, tracetest, distributed tracing, trace-based testing, microservices observability, serverless architecture monitoring, kubernetes, mock-free testing, asynchronous process testing, silent failure debugging, test assertions, system troubleshooting, external api monitoring

## Chapters

1. **Bridging observability and testing with distributed tracing** (00:01) — Combining OpenTelemetry distributed tracing with trace-based testing helps technical teams catch microservice errors before they reach production.
1. **Troubleshooting asynchronous processes and silent failures** (01:11) — Correlating failing requests with distributed traces uncovers silent failures that slip past unit tests in asynchronous message queues.
1. **Identifying unmanaged external API failures via trace tests** (02:11) — Running trace-based HTTP tests that assert status codes enables teams to detect and isolate hidden errors in unmanaged external APIs.
1. **Implementing observability-driven development without data mocking** (03:02) — Observability-driven development replaces artificial mocking and black-box testing with tests built entirely upon actual system data.

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