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
    Create Custom Events in MooTools 1.2

    Javascript has a number of native events like "mouseover," "mouseout", "click", and so on. What if you want to create your own events though? Creating events using MooTools is as easy as it gets. The MooTools JavaScript What's great about creating custom events in MooTools is...

  • By
    Reverse Element Order with CSS Flexbox

    CSS is becoming more and more powerful these days, almost to the point where the order of HTML elements output to the page no longer matters from a display standpoint -- CSS lets you do so much that almost any layout, large or small, is possible.  Semantics...

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!