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!
![LightFace: Facebook Lightbox for MooTools]()
One of the web components I've always loved has been Facebook's modal dialog. This "lightbox" isn't like others: no dark overlay, no obnoxious animating to size, and it doesn't try to do "too much." With Facebook's dialog in mind, I've created LightFace: a Facebook lightbox...
![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...
![Create a Twitter AJAX Button with MooTools, jQuery, or Dojo]()
There's nothing like a subtle, slick website widget that effectively uses CSS and JavaScript to enhance the user experience. Of course widgets like that take many hours to perfect, but it doesn't take long for that effort to be rewarded with above-average user retention and...
![CSS Rounded Corners]()
The ability to create rounded corners with CSS opens the possibility of subtle design improvements without the need to include images. CSS rounded corners thus save us time in creating images and requests to the server. Today, rounded corners with CSS are supported by all of...
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.