Big fan of nextest and this is my first time seeing this site. I'll be real I feel a bit ridiculous commenting this but you might want to consider rephrasing this:
>Treat tests as cattle, not pets. Detect and terminate slow tests.
Not sure saying, "hey, treat your tests as an animal you can kill at will" paints the right image.
This is from the Kubernetes saying of "treat servers like cattle, not pets". Of course, some people like me keep cattle as pets, but then again I also name my servers, even the virtual or containerised ones.
Yeah that was indeed the inspiration (though I'm pretty sure it predates Kubernetes!) but the juxtaposition with "terminate" is unfortunate.
I liked the way it was phrased. You can't make everybody happy. :)
It’s a horrible saying in that context also.
I mean, I like animals too, but in context it does make sense. The context was to treat them as "obtainable yet ultimately killable entities you keep as a group, not individuals", which cattle pretty much is. Unless you consider keeping cattle as draft animals, but I think that stopped being the main purpose a long time ago.
It got the point across, at a time where most people basically acquired servers, kept them until they died, and he was trying to push a development workflow where you constantly close("kill")/bring up new servers.
IMO, "make your servers fungible" is a better way to express the intent: slightly shorter, no metaphors, although "fungible" is a less common word. Maybe that's just me. (Edited to add: "make your tests fungible" has I think the wrong connotation; I think the original wording on the blog is about test executions -- and "make your test executions fungible" does seem like a good goal, similar to ACID guarantees for database transactions.)
Before that, I used to call them "ephemeral", and of course half the people asked what "ephemeral" means, probably "fungible" would be met with similar question, unless the crowd is cryptocurrency-adjacent, that term seems understood there.
That (unpleasant) saying predates Kubernetes by at least half a decade.
That's fair! I'll find a way to rephrase it.
edit: Updated to "Detect and handle slow tests". Thanks again!
It resonated with me!
Fungible/non fungible is a good alternative, and maybe the technically correct word. But I think in that case it doesn't apply and the change the author did is better.
"Treat tests as annuals not perennials"
"Treat tests as workers not management"