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Adán Carrasco
Adán Carrasco

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Testing in production, is that the way to go?

Today I'm not coming with a post but rather with a question on an interesting topic: Testing in production. Is that something you'll do? What are the tradeoffs?

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Short story:
This week I worked on releasing a new App interacting with data form existing services.

The App was having some issues and I wanted to debug locally to fix them, whereas other person insisted to deploy and test in production then fix.

We needed to submit the App to AppStore and PlayStore and his argument was to speed up the review process, mine was that fixing it locally would be cheaper, then we would submit and App that we knew was working.

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Any experiences on the topic? What would you have done? What would be your take?

Happy debate and thanks for sharing your ideas. :)

Top comments (1)

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Matt Del Signore

I think having a "prod-like" environment to test issues could be good. Often times testing in production is a really bad idea aside from just the usual stuff around breaking stuff for users (you can use things like special groups and flags to obviate that). There can be other issues like having unaudited access to user data.

The real reason to test in prod most times is to test things at scale. Having large corpuses of test data can help with this in your "prod-like" environments.