CppCon 2018

Your actively growing library or component is inadequately tested! Good enough maintenance is nearly impossible, because you cannot run all of your clients' software for regressions. 

Enter Playback-Based Testing (PBT)!!

Record artifact during client live session, playback in your lab with just your library. Curate "recordings" from clients for automated integration testing.The benefit/cost ratio can be spectacular, as library scales. (A cost is adapting or doubling the API layer). 

Consider leveraging these artifacts to improve author-client collaboration.

The talk: General architecture and strategy of PBT tools described. Impactful PBT is arguably most attainable through a Grow-Your-Own effort. Since it works by exploiting data otherwise thrown away,  PBT is like a second cousin of Time Travel Debugging (TTD).

Specific experience: Having been immersed in PBT mindset (a cornerstone of Autodesk Revit's success), William's team attacked flakiness in a Revit integration of provider's cloud data storage framework -- by cobbling together a PBT tool.

Introduce C++ headers-only library ("CppPlayer") intended as a PBT jump-start. It is available as open source at https://github.com/WilliamClements/CppPlayer ...