Today, it has become common as development teams to work with iterative cycles for rapid delivery. Testing in production sounds risky and daunting, but using feature flags and controlling rollouts can make shift-right testing seem achievable. It can help development teams to roll back any changes which get negative feedback.
Features flags or feature toggles allow teams to expose a new software or newer features of the same software to only a select part of the whole traffic of users in production to validate the smoothness of their application in real life. In this test, only some users can see new features of the same application. This process tests newer features or versions of the same software with a particular percentage of end-users in a production environment using an app testing tool. The system which does not receive the traffic becomes the production environment for testing. One of the applications receives user traffic, while the other receives updates from continuous integration (CI) servers. There are primarily two kinds of testing in production:įor this, two identical production application instances are created. This test helps the QA teams to gather a better idea of what to expect when actual audiences interact with the software upon release. While quality assurance teams stage environments to sort out any emergent issue as soon in the SDLC as possible, testing in production uses production data directly. This testing is not like development software or pre-production software built specifically for testing and isn’t available to the final users. Production software is the version software released to end-users. Testing in a production environment essentially tests production software. Instead of doing this in a staged environment, TIP is implemented with real-life people in continuous delivery. What is testing in production?Īs an essential software development practice, testing in production(also known as TIP) is the process that tests new changes on the live traffic of users. Especially for companies that release new features and additions to their applications, testing in production using an app testing platform or an app testing tool can be helpful. Simulating a live testing environment may be very difficult. Most organizations these days are going for testing in production and even make it a point to plan for it. Testing in production environment in the final stages of software development before releasing it to the public is essential. Running codes on production servers using data of real-life users is called testing in production.
Testing software is necessary to prevent code errors and design errors from reaching the production code.