SLO-Driven Testing: Turning Reliability Targets into an Executable Test Strategy
Modern delivery pipelines still treat “testing” as something that happens before release, yet most high-impact failures in distributed systems are reliability failures that only show up under real traffic, real data, and real dependencies. In this session you will learn a practical, SLO-driven approach to unify quality engineering and reliability engineering. Shalini will start by translating critical customer journeys into a small set of measurable SLIs like latency, availability, error rate, and correctness signals and setting SLOs that reflect user expectations. Then she will walk through how to turn those targets into an executable strategy; including contract tests that protect APIs, risk-based suites that run in CI, canary checks that validate releases, and synthetic monitors that continuously test production. Finally, she will cover how to use error budgets and incident postmortems to prioritize the next best tests instead of expanding test suites endlessly.
Shalini Sudarsan is a DevOps Engineering Leader at Kindercare Learning Companies, USA. designing reliable, secure, and cost-optimized data and AI platforms. A Forbes Technology Council Member, Fellow of IETE and Women in Engineering (WIE) Oregon section. She drives enterprise AI adoption with a governed operating model that speeds time-to-market while lowering risk and spend. Shalini’s expertise spans BI strategy, data platform architecture, MLOps, observability, and value realization. She is known for translating complex engineering into measurable business outcomes. Shalini brings deep technical rigor and business expertise in the areas of DevOps and Reliability Engineering. Shalini introduced SLO-driven development and reliability gates in CI/CD, reduced flaky tests with data-informed automation, and partnered with security and product teams to strengthen authentication, consent, and abuse-prevention flows. Previously at Nike, she led global SRE and platform engineering, delivering multi-region, zero-downtime systems and automation that reduced toil and costs.