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.
