In my last post, I talked about building a structured path to production: which tests to include, when to do them, and why. In this post, we’ll get into exactly how to do each kind of test.

We’ll cover the techniques of mocking and stubbing, and test-driven development to help each testing layer.

Less than three months ago, we launched CircleCI orbs, our package management ecosystem for CircleCI configuration. In that time we have seen over 300 orbs created in just the first 10 weeks and more than 200 organizations using orbs across over 1,000 projects in tens of thousands of builds. We are also featuring more than 20 official partner orbs through our new Technology Partner Program. We’re incredibly grateful for the huge and positive response.

In this piece, I want to take a look back and share the key design decisions that went into creating and launching CircleCI orbs. If you’re using orbs today and want to understand how to get the most from them, or if you’re thinking about designing your own package management system, this post is for you.

Over the last year, we have made some critical shifts in our understanding of what we believe makes a great engineering manager at CircleCI, and learned a lot about our needs and values as an organization along the way. We’ve changed our hiring process substantially, and through these efforts we’ve hired some fabulous people, doubling our engineering management team. Today, we want to share all these learnings with you.