[whack]

> Besides, staging environments never work, for a long list of reasons

Can you go into more detail on this? I would have thought that having a staging environment where all changes get battle-tested by the wider team, before being deployed to prod, would be a good thing.

[bjourne]

But in that case you have qualified people actually performing battle-testing. If you don't, then a staging area can be more than useless because developers think that making sure their code is bug free is someone else job. Also in most companies testing is deemed inferior to programming, so the least capable is assigned testing duties while the better programmers write the code. Which is wrong because battle-testing software takes just as much skill as developing it.

[Xeago]

Unless you can spin up and tear down a staging environment provisioned with data and instrumentation I too don’t believe in it. Without that you’ll be using something shared, where either one thing at a time is subjected to testing or you’re testing multiple things at once which could conflict (including falsely positive) with eachother.

Hope that provides a new perspective. If the team is small, or the product is not susceptible to concurrent development you might not have this phenomenon.

[Chyzwar]

Staging env should be (prod - 1) version. The whole point is to test thing together with other changes. Stage-environment is created to eliminated "works on my machine" problems.