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
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

  • By
    CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?

    How is it possible that JavaScript-based animation has secretly always been as fast — or faster — than CSS transitions? And, how is it possible that Adobe and Google consistently release media-rich mobile sites that rival the performance of native apps? This article serves as a point-by-point...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    pointer Media Query

    As more devices emerge and differences in device interaction are implemented, the more important good CSS code will become.  In order to write good CSS, we need some indicator about device capabilities.  We've used CSS media queries thus far, with checks for max-width and pixel ratios.

  • By
    Drag. Drop. Lock.

    I've received dozens of emails about my Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Using MooTools article. The MooTools in my article contained a lot of conditional code to require correct dropping per the game and many people requested that I simplify the process and just...

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!