[QA.TEM.1] Establish dedicated testing environments

Category: FOUNDATIONAL

Use testing environments to detect and correct issues earlier on in the development lifecycle. Deploy integrated changes into these environments before they are deployed to production. These environments are as production-like as possible, providing the ability to simulate real-world conditions which can validate that changes are ready for production deployment.

Design your testing environments to mimic production qualities that you need to test, such as monitoring settings or regional variants. At a minimum, have a staging environment that you monitor closely to catch potential issues early. More testing environments, such as beta or zeta, can be added as needed. Infrastructure as code (IaC) should be used for managing and deploying these environments, ensuring consistent and predictable provisioning. Minimize direct human intervention in these environments, similar to how you would treat production environments. Instead, rely on automated delivery pipelines with stages that deploy to the testing environment. Human access should be strictly controlled, auditable, and granted only in exceptional circumstances.

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