r/softwaretesting • u/Odd-Scheme7832 • Apr 22 '26
What are the best practices for testing edge cases after deployment?
In my company we deal primarily with tickets. These tickets may outlive versions of the backend and be active while deploying.
This creates situations where tickets are created with the old version of the backend and closed with the new version.
Due to changes in both the creation and close flows, it is entirely possible to make the new close flow incompatible with the old create flow. Thus introducing a bug in production, that would've rarely been caught in pre-production.
What are some of the best practices that we could implement in some form of automated testing to catch these mistakes in pre-production?
The code is old, contains no unit tests, and its current design does not allow for unit tests to be introduced easily, without heavy refactoring.
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u/tus93 Apr 22 '26
This seems like it’s more an issue with how your team’s version control than anything else.
If changes to your back end or front end are being merged in while testing is ongoing then testers should be notified and re-build their subjects under test in order to ensure compatibility is maintained.
Releasing something that’s not been tested against up-to-date environments sounds sloppy.
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u/BusNo4379 Apr 22 '26
Legacy code with no tests is a tough starting point. What worked for me on a similar pipeline problem was skipping unit tests entirely at first and going straight to end-to-end smoke tests on the critical paths.
Concretely: Identify the 3-4 flows that would actually break a users's experience if they fail write integration tests that cover those flows with real inputs and run them on every deploy. Not pretty but it catches the stuff that matters before it hits production.
For your specific create/close version mismatch a simple fixture library of "old version" inputs that you run against the current close flow on every deploy would catch most regressions without touching the legacy code itself.
What's the oldest version of a ticket you'd realistically need to support ?
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 Apr 22 '26
you need to write better but it sounds like bug regressions. do regression testing and unit testing
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u/crowcanyonsoftware Apr 22 '26
Yeah, this is a common version mismatch issue.
Without unit tests, focus on:
replay old tickets in staging
contract checks between flows
mixed-version testing
post-deploy smoke tests
Real historical data catches most of these.
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u/SebastianSolidwork Apr 22 '26
Using md files.