The Truth About Production Testing

By  on  

Testing on production environments is something you must do but really, really would prefer not to do, right?  You can do some incredible damage in a short amount of time if you aren't careful, and when things do run smoothly, you think to yourself "Why even take the risk?  I should just do this on the staging server and call it a day!"  Well, you can't get around automated and manual testing on production, and this image seems to represent what it feels like to do testing on production:

bulletproof

That's the first bulletproof vests being tested ... on a living human being.  If you don't see the parallel between that photo and production testing, you don't have a sense of humor.  Tread lightly when testing on production, people:  you could end up shooting yourself down quickly!

Recent Features

  • By
    Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide

    Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today's websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images...

  • By
    5 More HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    The HTML5 revolution has provided us some awesome JavaScript and HTML APIs.  Some are APIs we knew we've needed for years, others are cutting edge mobile and desktop helpers.  Regardless of API strength or purpose, anything to help us better do our job is a...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Full Width Textareas

    Working with textarea widths can be painful if you want the textarea to span 100% width.  Why painful?  Because if the textarea's containing element has padding, your "width:100%" textarea will likely stretch outside of the parent container -- a frustrating prospect to say the least.  Luckily...

  • By
    Pure CSS Slide Up and Slide Down

    If I can avoid using JavaScript for element animations, I'm incredibly happy and driven to do so.  They're more efficient, don't require a JavaScript framework to manage steps, and they're more elegant.  One effect that is difficult to nail down with pure CSS is sliding up...

Discussion

  1. This was a great little warning first thing in the morning. :) Thanks for the joke!

  2. Evgeniy

    Not sure why they can’t use a pig to test that vest.
    Also, if we can run full copy of production server for tests (and with copy of production DB), why not use it? Some external API can’t be copied (so we should consider about mocks instead of real payment gateways), but most “damage” usually goes to our DB, so I think it’s worth it. And it’s relatively cheap, if you use services with per-use payments.

  3. I’ts not advisable to do any testing on a production server. They should be done on the development server. Thanks for this piece.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!