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
    Send Text Messages with PHP

    Kids these days, I tell ya.  All they care about is the technology.  The video games.  The bottled water.  Oh, and the texting, always the texting.  Back in my day, all we had was...OK, I had all of these things too.  But I still don't get...

  • By
    Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS

    CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more.  I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create Keyboard Shortcuts with Mousetrap

    Some of the finest parts of web apps are hidden in the little things.  These "small details" can often add up to big, big gains.  One of those small gains can be found in keyboard shortcuts.  Awesome web apps like Gmail and GitHub use loads of...

  • By
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

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!