@simon See, my experience is that a (dedicated) staging environment *feels* like it reduces risk, but actually increases it: you’re more likely to treat production as a pet, and batch up changes from fear, where spinning up dedicated test environments before merging changes (or, better still, blue-green deploying) actually tests for issues explicitly. But, I’ll grant, requires more trust in the process, as well as more process being built.
@stevemarshall yeah, I totally buy that. I think the staging environment option is good for when the test suite for an older system just isn't thorough enough to be trustworthy
@simon @stevemarshall the one time I worked on a system that had explicitly designed for a staging system for testing purposes had then (before my time there) also spun out testing, qa, qa2, qa3, etc, all of which showing subtle differences, all of which gave little confidence when a prod deploy happened such that manual QA had to happen AGAIN anyway
@norm @simon @stevemarshall we do CD to staging with a promote to prod, but the process is that each individual change still gets released on its own - no batching
Works pretty well for us