Preparing for the Worst: Tabletop Exercises, Unit Tests, and Everything In Between

In this episode of "How Many CTOs Does It Take?" podcast, hosts Scott Porad and Brad Hefta-Gaub discuss TaskRabbit's overnight AWS region migration from us-west-1 to us-west-2, describing the months of preparation, detailed runbook, large war-room call, minor cleanup issues, and why periodic region moves can serve as valuable "hygiene" to relearn and document complex systems while advancing disaster recovery and business continuity. They then explain tabletop exercises as structured incident-response drills designed to uncover gaps in process and documentation, sharing scenario ideas like data deletion, token leaks, cloud outages, ransomware, and internal actors, including an embezzlement case where the perpetrator joined incident response. The conversation touches on an alleged AI sandbox escape involving Hugging Face, then debates claims that "unit tests are dead," arguing AI makes end-to-end testing easier but unit, integration, contract, and mutation testing remain important—especially for edge cases and dependency failures—and that agents can now generate extensive test coverage. 00:00 Cold Open Banter 00:35 Light Bulb Struggles 01:12 TaskRabbit Region Move 05:23 Tabletop Exercises Explained 10:06 Designing Scenarios 13:37 Insider Threat Tabletop 16:51 AI Sandbox Escape Story 21:19 Unit Tests Are Dead 25:16 Why E2E Misses Edge Cases 28:30 Mutation Testing Explained 31:25 Integration Tests Basics 33:23 Contract and API Testing 38:27 Third Party Outage Example 41:55 Golden Age of Validation 43:59 Wrap Up and Credits Resources:

How Many CTOs Pod: https://howmanyctospod.com
Scott Porad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottporad/
Brad Hefta-Gaub: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradheftagaub/

#TechPodcast #EngineeringPodcast #DevTalks #PodcastForDevs #HowManyCTOs #Podcast #CTOs #CTOPodcast #ChiefTechnologyOfficer #Technology #Engineering #SoftwareDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #TechLeadership #EngineeringLeadership #EngineeringCulture #TechDebates #AI #AIAssistedCoding #AIAssistedProgramming #AIProgramming #AICoding #AWS #AWSMigration #DisasterRecovery #TabletopDrills #TabletopExercises #UnitTesting #EndToEndTesting #APITesting #Microservices #IncidentResponse #UnitTestsAreDead #UnitTestsAren'tDead #TestingStrategies #AIStories

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(94)

What Broke in Tech: Code Quality, AI Guardrails, and the Evolving Software Engineer

In this episode of "How Many CTOs Does It Take?" podcast, hosts Scott Porad and Brad Hefta-Gaub continue to recap Gergely Orosz's "State of the Tech Industry" talk and focus on what "broke" and "what'...

3 Nov 36min

The State of Tech in 2026: What Changed And What Didn't

In this episode of "How Many CTOs Does It Take?" podcast, hosts Scott Porad and Brad Hefta-Gaub discuss a Pragmatic Engineer talk on the state of the tech industry in 2026, focusing on what changed an...

27 Okt 32min

The Human Needs in Augmented Coding: A Conversation with Kent Beck

In this episode of "How Many CTOs Does It Take?" podcast, hosts Scott Porad and Brad Hefta-Gaub interview software pioneer Kent Beck about his background (JUnit, test-driven development, extreme progr...

20 Okt 1h 9min

Understanding The Fear: Adaptive Leadership in the AI Age

In this episode of "How Many CTOs Does It Take?" podcast, hosts Scott Porad and Brad Hefta-Gaub discuss growing fear about AI among engineers and managers, framing it as an "adaptive moment" requiring...

6 Okt 34min

Simplifying Tech Through Empathy and Understanding with Frank Bravo

In this episode of "How Many CTOs Does It Take?" podcast, host Brad Hefta-Gaub is joined by guest Frank Bravo, a Bay Area technologist who spent 30 years as CTO in local media, helping put a newspaper...

29 Sep 50min

Managing Skepticism: Balancing Tradition and Technology with AI

In this episode of "How Many CTOs Does It Take?" podcast, hosts Scott Porad and Brad Hefta-Gaub discuss how AI is changing software engineering referencing Kent Beck's idea that AI makes much existing...

22 Sep 49min

From Academia to Industry: Scott Hanson on the Future of AI and Edge Computing

In this episode of "How Many CTOs Does It Take?" podcast, hosts Scott Porad and Brad Hefta-Gaub interview Scott Hanson, founder and CTO of Ambiq, a company focused on ultra-low-power chips for "intell...

15 Sep 45min