Various Environments in Software Development

The journey of a software, starts from the core idea and goes on to the deployment of the final product.

As our app, website, web app, or any tech product starts receiving huge traffic, it becomes important to provide the reliable services.
Any error or bug in the code will lead to servers crashing down, which may eventually lead to huge losses in terms of both finances and number of users.
Thus, the deployment of a new code, or changes in existing code base must go through a set of procedures to ensure smooth and bug free experience. Therefore, we need different environments, and each has its own role to play.

There are basically 4 environments or stages:

1. Development Environment
2. Testing Environment
3. Staging Environment
4. Production Environment

Development Environment

If you have ever written code, then there is a high chance that you were working in Development environment.
In this environment, it's basically about writing code to build your websites, apps, web-apps, extensions, and everything else.

Testing Environment

Now once you are done building your product, as a developer, you start writing testing scripts.
In Test Scripts you write test cases, to test and to find bug in your own code so that you can correct them.
Developers usually do minimal testing in this stage.

Staging Environment

Once developers are done with developing and testing at their level, codebase is sent for testing in Staging Environment.
At this stage, rigorous testing is done.
There are basically two types of tetsing:

1. Automatic Testing
2. Manual Testing

For example your code is staged for first time, then you'll be having Stage 1 -> Version 1.0
Now tester will come up with some improvements. Developer will implement those improvements and thus now you are in Stage 2 and product is in Version 2.0

This stage continues in loop until a satisfactory Version is developed.

Production Environment

Anything Which goes into production, has to be defect free.
This is the simple rule that must be followed.

Once previous stages are complete, code is deployed and is available for customers to use.

So this is a small and crisp information on different environments. Hope you found it useful and interesting. If you do, please follow for more upcoming articles.