[Eduard]

My website runs on OpenShift. I deploy to production as soon as a new feature or hotfix/bugfix is ready. To be convinced that these changes work well and don't break any other working behavior, I first push the new version to a another server ("staging server"), which basically is a clone of the production server.

On the staging server, I observe if everything works well by going through some use case scenarios manually. Once I'm convinced that everything works well, I deploy the new version to the production server for my beta testers to try out and give feedback.

So cycles of "new versions on production" can currently take anything between a few minutes (really quick bugfix, "OMG the website is not working at all!") and a few days (new feature)

One could complain that there should be a test suite running unit tests and integration tests, taking care of making sure everything works well. But I have two observations that make it impossible for me to rely on a big automatic test suite:

* as my website is still technically in an explorative mode, constructing test cases is wasteful: my website's architecture changes quickly to adapt to new insights. I rather spend my resources on developing features than on a test suite that doesn't work with the new architecture. * Subtle differences on my production server (limited server resources, different HTTP request behavior) make it impossible to rely on a simulated environment for my integration tests. Therefore, I have a staging server with the exact configuration as my production server. The only difference are IP address and domain name. These differences shouldn't break anything in my website, but you never know until it breaks the first time :)