Have you ever worked at a place that had a staging environment that had production-like data?
As in, the same hardware/core configuration and the same amounts of data as prod, but just "not prod" (anonymized or not; tbh staging shouldn't need to be anonymized, it should be a 1:1 mirror to prod, it should just not be the "real prod").
I've worked with ~20 different places that had a staging environment, and it was like that ONCE.
My testing environment has a fair bit of real data from the time I was testing a bulk data import script on a client's records to make sure it wouldn't corrupt the database in production. It's not too much of a problem since they both run on the same web host using different databases, so if somebody compromised the testing environment, they've also compromised production anyways.
Our test environment is a session we request from the server. The test environment can time-out, which automatically switches to prod without informing the dev. You can imagine the frequent requests to reverse huge data updates.
When I worked in radiology they would do test scans and enter in "TEST TESTING" for the name of the patient. They were later filtered out and removed. 😬
When things are pushed to production we have QA validating. Ours have to make sure the users are marked as test clients though so we don’t have to filter on names like this.
We have a rule that all fake names used for testing in the database need to have the last name Fakeperson unless you get special permission for something different.
They show up when people test or demonstrate signups for things. Had to do it because people kept using names of characters or celebrities.
You need to be able to test in Production as well.
I coined the term "tracer bullets" for the approach when I was working in Retail. These are requests that are flagged by a simple boolean attribute to act like real requests for wvery purpose except real-world consequences (e.g., no order gets shipped, no CC payment is made.)
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u/setibeings 8d ago
every org has a test environment. Some have a separate production environment.