Creating enterprise-wide integration test environments is a common, wasteful practice that slows everything down. These environments invariably become a precious resource that's hard to replicate and a bottleneck to development. They also provide a false sense of security due to inevitable discrepancies in data and configuration overhead between environments. Ironically, a common objection to the alternatives — either ephemeral environments or multiple on-prem test environments — is cost. However, this fails to take into account the cost of the delays caused by enterprise-wide integration test environments as development teams wait for other teams to finish or for new versions of dependent systems to be deployed. Instead, teams should use ephemeral environments and, preferably, a suite of tests owned by the development team that can be spun up and discarded cheaply, using fake stubs for their systems rather than actual replicas. For other techniques that support this alternative take a look at contract testing, decoupling deployment from release, focus on mean time to recovery and testing in production.
When the enterprise-wide quarterly or monthly releases were considered best practice, it was necessary to maintain a complete environment for performing testing cycles prior to deployment to production. These enterprise-wide integration test environments (often referred to as SIT or Staging) are a common bottleneck for continuous delivery today. The environments themselves are fragile and expensive to maintain, often with components that need manual configuration by a separate environment management team. Testing in the staging environment provides unreliable and slow feedback, and testing effort is duplicated with what can be performed on components in isolation. We recommend that organizations incrementally create an independent path to production for key components. Important techniques include contract testing, decoupling deployment from release, focus on mean time to recovery and testing in production.
When the enterprise-wide quarterly or monthly releases were considered best practice, it was necessary to maintain a complete environment for performing testing cycles prior to deployment to production. These enterprise-wide integration test environments (often referred to as SIT or Staging) are a common bottleneck for continuous delivery today. The environments themselves are fragile and expensive to maintain, often with components that need manual configuration by a separate environment management team. Testing in the staging environment provides unreliable and slow feedback, and testing effort is duplicated with what can be performed on components in isolation. We recommend that organizations incrementally create an independent path to production for key components. Important techniques include contract testing, decoupling deployment from release, focus on mean time to recovery and testing in production.
