Practice : Exploratory Testing of New Infrastructure Features

Purpose and Strategic Importance

Exploratory Testing of New Infrastructure Features enables teams to safely evaluate emerging cloud-native capabilities, tools, or services in a controlled, low-risk environment before broad adoption. By fostering curiosity and structured experimentation, teams gain practical experience, uncover limitations early, and reduce the risk of poorly understood technology introducing operational issues.

Without exploratory testing, new infrastructure features are often adopted reactively, based on assumptions rather than evidence, increasing complexity, delivery risk, and long-term technical debt.

Description of the Practice

  • Teams set aside dedicated time to explore, test, and validate new infrastructure features or platform capabilities.
  • Experiments are conducted in isolated, non-production environments to avoid impacting live systems.
  • Findings, risks, and opportunities are documented and shared across teams.
  • Exploratory testing informs platform decisions, technical design, and adoption strategies.

How to Practise It (Playbook)

1. Getting Started

  • Identify emerging infrastructure features or capabilities relevant to your systems (e.g. new Kubernetes functionality, cloud services, IaC tooling).
  • Allocate time for structured exploratory testing, separate from delivery work.
  • Conduct experiments in isolated environments with observability and safety controls in place.
  • Capture learnings, limitations, and technical risks as part of the process.

2. Scaling and Maturing

  • Integrate exploratory testing into platform roadmaps and technical evaluation processes.
  • Encourage knowledge sharing through demos, documentation, and technical communities of practice.
  • Use exploratory testing outcomes to inform platform enablement materials, templates, and standards.
  • Track the impact of exploratory testing on adoption confidence and reduced production issues.

3. Team Behaviours to Encourage

  • Foster curiosity and safe experimentation with new infrastructure capabilities.
  • Treat exploratory testing as valuable, intentional learning, not unstructured play.
  • Collaborate across engineering, platform, and operations teams to evaluate risks and benefits.
  • Use experimentation to reduce uncertainty before committing to new technology.

4. Watch Out For…

  • Unstructured experimentation that produces no actionable insights.
  • Premature adoption of untested features into production systems.
  • Teams neglecting exploratory testing due to delivery pressure.
  • Poor documentation of learnings, reducing shared understanding.

5. Signals of Success

  • Teams adopt new infrastructure features with greater confidence and fewer production issues.
  • Operational risks and limitations are identified early through testing.
  • Learning from experiments is shared widely, improving platform maturity.
  • Teams feel empowered to explore new technologies safely and effectively.