How does Facebook get tested?

TestFacebook Venn The focus of this blog has always been to talk about testing Facebook applications. There are plenty of places to read about software testing or Facebook, but this is the one place to get that intersection. With this in mind I’m going to stray from our charter and talk about testing Facebook. No, not how to test your Facebook app, but how does Facebook test Facebook.

That’s right. Have you ever thought about how Facebook tests its own product? Well wonder no more as the good people at Quora have already asked that question, and Steven Grimm, Facebook’s test engineering tech lead has provided quite a good answer.

A few interesting take-aways:

For a company that’s so grounded in PHP, it’s interesting to see that they’re so heavily invested in Watir, a tool from the Ruby world.
“Facebook has no dedicated QA team.” Now for many people, this will come as no surprise. For others from a more traditional development background, no dedicated QA for something as large and mission critical as Facebook seems like a really bad idea.
They don’t talk about load testing. From what we can tell, they probably don’t even do it. In a lot of respects, a proper load test of Facebook is probably far more trouble than it’s worth.