The Truth About Production Testing
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:

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!
![CSS Filters]()
CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have...
![CSS @supports]()
Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS. What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix. Yuck. Another thing we...
![Modal-Style Text Selection with Fokus]()
Every once in a while I find a tiny JavaScript library that does something very specific, very well. My latest find, Fokus, is a utility that listens for text selection within the page, and when such an event occurs, shows a beautiful modal dialog in...
![MooTools: Set Style Per Media]()
I'd bet one of the most used MooTools methods is the setStyle() method, which allows you to set CSS style declarations for an element. One of the limitations of MooTools' setStyle() method is that it sets the specific style for all medias.
This was a great little warning first thing in the morning. :) Thanks for the joke!
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.
I’ts not advisable to do any testing on a production server. They should be done on the development server. Thanks for this piece.