Why Production Is Not A Test Environment

Production contains customers, invoices, monitoring noise and consequences. These properties distinguish it from a test environment, which generally contains hope.

If a change requires the phrase “we will know quickly”, it should be tested somewhere else first.

Production is the environment where assumptions become customer-facing. It is usually connected to money, reporting, legal obligations and someone who remembers the old system.

Signs you may be in production include:

• Alerts have recipients
• Data has owners
• Rollbacks require communication
• Screenshots appear in incident reports
• Derek asks what the change cost

Testing in production is sometimes described as pragmatic. This is acceptable only when production is explicitly designed for controlled experimentation, the blast radius is understood and the word “controlled” still means something.

For ordinary changes, Notwerking recommends using test environments, staged rollouts, feature flags and monitoring that can distinguish success from delayed failure.

If production must be used to discover what the code does, open an incident report first. It saves time later.