Every site has a dev environment, some are lucky enough to have a separate production one.
Oooh, look at Mr fancy with a seperate Dev/prod environment.
When I was a young dev My senior took me into the city To push my code to prod He said "Son, when you promo Would you be the savior of the broken The buggy and the OOM'd?"last place I worked had an environment refered to as poc/staging. poc. staging. these are supposed to be as far apart as possible in a non prod environment not combined.
This is what feature flags are for. You can test in production to your hearts content if you use them!
Yeah. Warning - uninvited poetic waxing on feature flags and leadership choices, incoming...
We all agree we inevitably do some live testing at our customers risk, because no test environment is perfect.
With feature flags, we're able to negotiate how many of our customers to test on, at a time.
But some of us prefer to forgo feature flags and risk our entire customer base on every change. It saves money, at least for a little while.
I'm not exactly fun at executive leadership meetings, but somehow I keep getting invited to them. Heh.
My job is in that picture and I don't like it
That's what staging is for...
The first sign that the company you just joined is amateur hour, every hour of the day, every day of the year is that they don't have a Staging environment.
look at this guy who thinks that staging is gonna help things
I've seen, again an again, deploying to Staging and integration testing in that Production-like environment together with the software of other teams, reveal problems that we did not saw in Dev, thus saving us from deploying into Production software that broke or, worse, corrupted the database.
This was certainly very important when I worked in environments such as Investment Banking where Production being down because of integration issues or, worse, sending bad data to other systems or the database having to be rolled back to the overnight backup, might mean the business losing millions of dollars.
It's not a foolproof mechanism but it certainly catches most integration problems, which are often most of the problems in complex environments where multiple teams are responsible for multiple highly integrated software systems,
Granted, little teams doing small software systems in simple environments were their software has little or no integration with other software, can probably get away with not having a Staging environment if their Dev environments has the same setup as Production (same OS, same database and so on) since they're going to have very little in the way of Integration problems with other people's software.
