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by deeteecee 1540 days ago
> They're not arguing that testing or staging environments are bad, they're just saying their organization couldn't manage to get them working.

That is exactly what I got from reading this article. Their staging process was poorly set up and they simply abandoned ship. Additionally, I was getting poor software culture vibes.
2 comments
resonious 1540 days ago
Indeed, I found the "We only merge code that is ready to go live" part odd. It seems unrelated to the presence of absence of a staging environment. Where I work, we use staging and also only merge code that is ready to go live.

Similarly, "Poor ownership of changes" and "People mistakenly let process replace accountability" just don't seem staging-related to me. I've been in environments where people throw code over the fence straight into production.

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lbriner 1539 days ago
The way I read that is, if you have a staging environment, it is someone else's job to test things before they deploy (Product Manager etc.) which allows them to merge it and forget it. I agree if it is the dev's job then it wouldn't make sense.

The other issue that is fair is the potential lag between dev and production if you have a gate at staging. This way, a developer is likely to move onto something else instead of watching their baby swim into production with all the errors that could cause!

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relaxing 1539 days ago
Why would you merge code that wasn’t ready to go live?
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sverhagen 1539 days ago
I actually empathize with the statements in the article about the challenges of managing a staging environment. For a lot of systems I worked on, short of just copying customer data into the staging environment (which, depending on your industry or the contracts with your customers may be a big no-no, and the more-distributed your system, the harder that also was to do) it was extremely hard to populate the staging environment with representative data. Or representative state in third-party systems.

(Not to say that testing on a developer's machine wouldn't have these same problems, of course, which I also find the article glosses over.)

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