Daniel Coburn

I have worked in several different development environments in my time working on and off line.  A consistent problem with any software is the developers inability to determine exactly what a customer is going to experience.  Why? Because even if a developer creating a windows application tests it on Vista and XP, the customer might have a newer service pack, or some sort of add-on that might conflict, or a person is running bootcamp on a mac.  While this can also be true in web development it works several different ways, both good and bad.

1. There are so many different browsers you can regression test only so far before you have to say, “We no longer Support IE 4″
2. With the addition of plugin’s to firefox you have no clue what the total environment will be, and there is a slight chance of a user having something “odd” going on.

But where you can control items is in your QA process: Development = QA = Staging = Production.

When I worked at Northrup and developed testing software for the ICBM program we knew that ever aspect of our environments were identical and we never had hiccups (ok once we did, but that was a low level windows configuration).  But for all of our testing I knew that the data in test was only 1 week old compared to production, all the images in staging matched all 3 other environments etc.

If I logged into QA a week before a deploy I knew the page would look exactly how it would show up in production.

Why am I bringing this up? Very simply, it’s hard to test a product when you don’t know if it will match production.  A particular issue I’m referring too is a server configuration that is really out of the hands of development, and really cause a huge SEO headache over the weekend.  What was it? Imagine this you have several top level domains like www.danielcoburn.com and www.bethegamer.com, but for your testing and staging you consolidate onto one domain like: test-daniel.danielcoburn.com and test-gamer.danielcoburn.com.  While you can maintain the data and images like I mentioned you lose one function that you would never look for except for today.

The development crew created a great single sign on for all of our systems, and they would share a cookie with the primary domain, in test no problem, they actually all exist on the same domain, but in production they are now separate cookies that could cause other problems.  And we found one this weekend. After several back and forths with development we figured out the issue and why we were watching pages fall off of Google daily.  The damage was however done, and we are now working to recover.  But at the end of the day the lesson here is to try to get your environments 100% in sync if you can.  If you cannot, be vigilant in your monitoring of your site, you never know when one will bite you, or you might “save the world”