2 out of 3 ain’t bad?!?

I saw a statistic today that really surprised me.

In a survey taken earlier this year on software testing, 66% of respondents stated that they have no staging environment (emphasis mine).

A staging environment is designed to mimic a production environment as closely as possible. It’s the place where an application is (or should be) tested before it goes into production. Unless people misunderstood the question, the results of the survey indicate that two in three developers do not test their applications in an environment that resembles production!

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve worked in places where production applications ran from machines in unusual places. In one case, a machine running in the developer area was turned off during a move, only to have some production users scream that their application was down! In another case, a vital system was running under a reception desk!

I’m sure my experiences are not unique.

These days, with cheaper hardware and technologies like virtualization, there are fewer excuses for not having a staging environment.

One excuse is time. It takes time to set up and manage a separate environment. But it’s well worth the time if it makes production rollouts smoother.

Another excuse is that it is often not easy to set up multiple independent environments on the same machine. For some applications (web servers, databases, etc.) it is difficult to run multiple instances on a single server. (This, by the way, is one of the reasons I decided to develop BundleWorks.)

I would be interested in hearing from developers about the importance they place on a staging environment, and what tools and techniques people have developed to set up and maintain such an environment.