Best practice for test and production environments
In the company where I work, we have 2 environments: test and production. We are not currently starting a new environment, because of cost.
Here is the procedure we follow: business makes a feature request, development makes it happen and deploys it on test environment. Then business tests it (UAT), and if it's OK, the feature will be included into next production deployment.
The problem is best practices for test DB. Developers treat test environment as their playground, and sometimes they reset the DB to initial state for testing purposes. On the other hand, business people think that test DB must be stable, and should not be reset. We would like to resolve this issue, and decide if test environment should belong to development team or business team. (Developers don't want business to put their nose in test env., but business team is paying for servers.)
What is the best practice about environments? Can you recommend an article about this?
Answer
I've worked in many companies, each one with a different set of environments, the one I have like the most had 5 environments:
1) Local: Basically your machine. Here is where you code and test your changes before even asking a peer for review.
2) Dev: If for some reason you cannot test your code locally (Dependencies issues mainly: "My code has neves compiled in my machine but it compiles perfectly in Jenkins/Bamboo/Travis"), then you push your changes to your feature branch in Git and make Bamboo compile it and deploy it to a dev server where you can test (you are still not sure if it will work, so no peer review so far).
3) Staging: You think your code work and you love how it looks like. You create a Pull Request in order for you peers to take a look at it before it gets merged to the master branch. Here they make comments and you fix possible issues, since you are more sure about your changes you make Bamboo deploy it to the Staging environment where more "stable" code lives and more realistic data is stored in whatever database is there. Once deployed another developer/tester can check your changes actually work and make you a "QA Sign off in Staging Env."
4) Stable: Ok, now you are ultimate sure your changes work since you deployed to Staging and nothing got broken. You merge your branch to master and Bamboo compiles master and deploys to another sets of servers in a Stable Environment (no one else should merge to master until you finish your deployment to Production, to avoid a merge of not related merges). This environment should be a replica from Production, data, code and server conditions. Here is where you show your changes to your manager, product owner or the person in charge to validate your work before sending it to production. You get the final approval, everything is good, you are sweaty, you have worked for 30 days in a row to get this change done, your wife divorced you but you are very confident it works perfectly.
5) Production: Where the clients connect to consume the company services, or the final build of your software to send to customers. With a few clicks in Bamboo you make it deploy to Production servers or compile the final build. It is green, everything seems to be ok. You check Splunk looking for errors, everything is good, life is good, you drink another sip of coffee before leaving, you drive home and sleep all weekend with your dog by your side.
It's a happy ending because having so many "Test" environments ensure quality, no change gets to production until EVERYBODY (not just you) are completely sure that changes is working.