Best practice for test and production environments

Question

In the company where I work, we have 2 environments: test and production. We are not currently starting a new environment, because of cost.

Here is the procedure we

Answer 1

I believe in order to establish an environment strategy that supports all ALM/SDLC activities 4 requirements should exist:

1) Development environment: to allow Dev to play around with new code/concepts and typically unit test with some basic integration testing using stubs and drivers. This environment should have loose change control procedures and would typically not be anywhere near the same scale as production. This is where the Dev team can build and tear down setups as required.

2) Interop environment: where integration of systems can be further tested and increased capability for non-functional testing I.e might be a resilient env with greater scalability than Dev. I'd see this environment having tighter change control and management. Test would perform integration and system testing in this environment.

3) Reference Architecture: This is what some might call pre-prod but is essentially the same as production in terms of scale and resilience. This would have change control and management procedures akin to prod. This env would support further test activities especially full scale performance testing, failover as well as operational fault triage and maintenance activities once a product is launched to customers.

4) Production: This environment will support live customers and so test activities will be limited once this is the case. This will be fully managed and have strict change management and config management processes.

Hope this helps