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!
![How to Create a Twitter Card]()
One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook. Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...
![9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos]()
As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us. Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos. Another technology available...
![Create a CSS Flipping Animation]()
CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...
![Disable Autocomplete, Autocapitalize, and Autocorrect]()
Mobile and desktop browser vendors do their best to help us not look like idiots by providing us autocomplete, autocorrect, and autocapitalize features. Unfortunately these features can sometimes get in the way; we don't always want or need the help they provide. Luckily most browsers allow...
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.