You Test In Production

I always enjoy hearing about heretical ideas in software methodology. I remember the first time I read the phrase “if it hurts, do it more often” in one of Martin Fowler’s articles.

And I had a similar feeling recently when reading Pete Hodgson’s article "Hello, production”:

Deploying something useless into production, as soon as you can, is the right way to start a new project.

It seems like this is the right time—the cloud era—to talk seriously about putting “Hello, world” into production.

Make it real

There’s nothing more motivating than seeing your work live. That feeling of This is real now. It’s almost like the advice you hear if you’re having trouble committing to a trip to a new place: book the flight immediately and then fill in the details of your agenda later. Booking the flight is the smallest action you can take to make the trip real.

If you think this is hard now, imagine how hard it will be later

It’s much harder to establish an automated deployment pipeline when you’ve got a bunch of existing, complex crap to deploy. It’s never easier to figure it out then when your deployment package is a single static HTML file.

As Pete writes:

It’s a lot more pleasant to work through these processes calmly at the start of development, rather than rushing to get everything squared away in front of a fast-approaching launch deadline.

In my experience, the go-live launch for systems built out this way tends to go extremely smoothly, to the point of being anti-climactic.

I can’t think of any descriptor I’d rather have associated with my production deployment than “anti-climactic”!

Why deploy without features

There’s no feature more valuable than the ability to deliver additional features easily.

Prod is the only thing that’s real

I will say that in my 15 years in the software industry I’ve never seen a UAT environment that was truly “the same” as production. Not once. Despite all claims to the contrary by the people involved. Not once have I worked on an application where there weren’t bugs that only cropped up in production. Let’s stop pretending that we don’t test things in production. Production is the only place to really test something.