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

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools dwCheckboxes Plugin

    Update / Fix: The checkboxes will no longer toggle when the "mouseup" event doesn't occur on a checkbox. Every morning I wake up to a bunch of emails in my Gmail inbox that I delete without reading. I end up clicking so many damn checkboxes...

  • By
    Create a Dynamic Table of Contents Using MooTools 1.2

    You've probably noticed that I shy away from writing really long articles. Here are a few reasons why: Most site visitors are coming from Google and just want a straight to the point, bail-me-out ASAP answer to a question. I've noticed that I have a hard time...

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!