Re: [PLUG] dev vs production environments

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 9:30 AM, Kevin McAllister <kevin@mcallister.ws> wrote:
> 2. Being able to test your rollout/release procedure (because everyone knows that never causes a problem at 2 AM)

++

I've seen things missed in packaging on more than one occasion.  If
you don't actually test the install process you don't know that you
have it right.

Plus, if your installs into production aren't properly managed then
good luck ever reproducing your production environment if something
goes wrong or if you want to change VM vendors/etc.

I tend to work on applications that are regulated so formal
verification of requirements tends to be a big thing.
Production-equivalent test environments are a big part of this,
although to be fair we don't always test performance/etc (so it might
not be identical in terms of load, and we do oversubscribe the VMs
more, etc).  I've seen some projects wipe their test environments and
back-populate them from production backups/etc between releases to
stage for the next cycle.  We do keep our official test systems under
formal change management.

If you don't have a regulatory or serious liability driver you can
probably get by with less.  However, there really is no excuse in
today's world of VMs to not have a clean VM to do your testing on.
Testing is also less disruptive to development when developers don't
have to be careful to not break things during test windows.  It is
just good practice.

Rich
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