Supercharging your engineering teams doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice quality. When teams are moving fast, it’s common to see an uptick in quality issues making their way to production. The knee-jerk reaction might be to slow things down or intensify TDD/BDD unit tests. While helpful, these measures often don’t tackle the root causes. Consider structural changes to the motions your teams go through with their deployment strategies. Implementing a 3-tiered or 4-tiered deployment model—comprising dev, test, staging, and production environments, all integrated within a robust CI/CD pipeline. This keeps your teams moving fast without compromising quality.
Here’s a brief rundown of each environment’s role and tips to maximize effectiveness:
DEV: The playground for developers, either locally or in the cloud. This space allows for unimpeded experimentation and innovation without affecting other environments.
TEST: Mirroring the production layout, this is where all changes—including non-code adjustments like IaC/terraform, database migrations, etc.—are first pushed. It is the first environment where initial functional testing and automated test suites help find problems.
STAGING: Your production’s dress rehearsal. This near-replica of your production environment is where the final tests occur, ensuring all changes are polished and stable. It also offers a sneak peek to internal stakeholders and select customers, demonstrating reliability and readiness.
PROD: The final frontier where thoroughly tested changes are deployed, ensuring minimal disruption or downtime.
Pro tips:
Sync Your Environments: Keep all environments as close to production as possible. Regularly update your staging environment with recent data to expose your team to real-life edge cases, using data scrambling or mocking for privacy.
Automate Everything: Commit to automating your deployment processes across code, infrastructure, and data changes. The investment pays off in faster, higher-quality releases.
Embed QA in Your Culture: Integrate quality assurance throughout your process, from ideation to functional testing. Focus on comprehensive, holistic tests that simulate real user interactions for the greatest impact.
Expose Scaling Issues: Operate lower-tier environments with reduced resources to reveal potential scaling issues early. This helps identify and rectify less optimal approaches before they escalate in production environments, ensuring smoother scalability under real-world loads.
By rethinking our approach to deployment, we not only enhance our ability to scale but also solidify the quality that our customers expect and deserve. Unlock your team’s potential and make the investments. The dividends are compounding!
