Should we practice "system test driven development?"
Maybe not! ATDD and similar things are already here!
Caught a v neat article on InfoQ by Stefan Friese on architecturally aligned testing... it's useful read.
I reproduce my comment, below, before I forget a few simple ideas...
Stefan, a great article!
Also check out Caitie MaCaffrey's talks / paper on distributed systems verification . . .
Rechtin on Ultraquality - Redundancy and Fault Tolerance
The Writings of a Complex Systems Architecture Legend
In his classic (but criminally overlooked) 1991 book "Systems Architecting, Creating and Building Complex Systems," Eberhardt Rechtin discusses technical, managerial and architectural responses to the challenge of building high quality systems. Despite being several decades old, 'modern' techniques like Lean manufacturing . . .
Neal Ford Devops and Mircroservices
Architecture for Continuous Delivery
An interesting interview with Neal Ford on Devops and Microservices.
Check out the discussion on testing from 10m30s
Architecting Continuously Testable Systems
Testability Quality Factor for Continuous Delivery in Digital Systems
TL;DR; When we architect systems using automated testing and test-first approaches, we quickly see testability constraints move to our system boundary. Low testability quality factor in external services is a key constraint on our ability to continuously prove our system is in a state of production readiness. We require external systems . . .
Legacy Architecture and Testability
Manual Test Teams and Testability Architectural Debt
The architecture of specification subsystems has always been critical to quality factors like cycle time -
Industry estimates indicate that between 30 and 50 percent (or in some cases, even more) of the cost of developing well-engineered systems is taken up by testing. If the software architect can reduce this cost, the payoff . . .