Moving fast without breaking things — Part 2: Preview Environments

Part 2: Preview Environments – Early Feedback, No Surprises Link to heading

Spinning up a full preview environment for every feature branch gives teams a crystal ball – see into the future of a release before it hits production.

The Waiting Game Between Dev and Prod Link to heading

Fast forward a few months: our startup’s user base is growing, and so is our team. We now have a salesperson eager to demo new features, a product manager hungry to validate changes, and a QA engineer trying to test scenarios before launch. The pressure is on to deliver reliably. Yet, we noticed a troubling gap in our process. Code would go from a developer’s local environment into a black box until it emerged on staging. During that gap, only automated tests had seen it. The first time non-engineers or other teams touched a feature was when it was already merged and deployed to a shared staging environment – sometimes just days (or hours!) before a production release. Talk about last-minute feedback!