Testing In Production

Historically, companies have attempted to make sure that the software they produce has been thoroughly tested in various stages of development, including testing for bugs in the development and staging environments. The more thorough testing that is performed before a new product is launched to the public allows the company to avoid having to deal with unexpected errors when a product is rolled out into the hands of their customers.

Software development and quality engineering teams spend a lot of time and effort testing the site, building test suites, and automating certain features. The product is tested against the production environment to ensure that it meets all customer expectations.

It is often difficult to simulate real-world software in a test environment. Modern systems have many dependencies, and there are many edge cases that simply cannot be properly simulated. Therefore, production testing is a necessary part of development/devops processes and important for software testing.

Testing Production With Feature Flags

Feature flags allow engineering teams to expose new software to only a fraction of live production traffic. This is useful for putting experimental or new features into production while still knowing that they work as expected in real-time. Companies can also use feature flags to roll out changes to their software without having to test with a large portion of their production traffic. By using a feature flag, companies can track whether the change worked as expected and roll back any uncaught bugs by killing the feature flag.

Feature flagging tools can also be used for testing new features for their impact on the user experience. The feature can then be enabled in production and a comparison made to the previous version of the software.

This allows the business to identify which features have a positive impact on the user experience and which ones do not. It also allows software engineers to verify that their new features are highly functional and effective, as well as the direct results of their change.

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