Testing in Production Environment – What, Why and How?
Testing in Production (TiP) means to perform various tests in a production state or live environment. It helps you to focus on few areas of the functionalities used in the application that usually remains unscripted. Testing in Production is not only important but also critical as it allows testers to detect bugs in the real world scenarios and to ensure if the application works the way is it expected to after the deployment.
Testers are given a separate QA environment for end-to-end testing and are usually not allowed to perform testing in the production environment. As per standard practice, it is only the smoke and sanity tests that are carried out in the production environment.
Why is Testing in Production Environment Important?
Mostly the developer makes the required changes in the application and deploys it on production without verifying it from the QA team just to keep application live and running, however, these frequent changes creates a lot of bugs in the application. In such cases, the application crashes hampering the overall user experience. Testing in Production (TiP) if done on a daily basis eliminates the risk due to such frequent deployments on the production environment.
In most of the project, testing in production is avoided considering it to be risky for the end user. However, testing in production can be carried on a daily basis to eliminate the risk and to monitor the application’s stability in the production environment.
How should Testing in Production Environment be Performed?
The QA team should be encouraged to integrate production testing in their daily testing cycle. An excellent way is to create a daily sanity checklist for the production testing that covers all the main functionalities of the application. Also, the modules in the application can be divided into small chunks and distributed among the QA team to test and check for the quality of the application. The testers and QAs must ensure that the Testing in Production environment must regularly be followed to maintain the quality of the application.
Guidelines to Perform Testing in Production Environment
Outlined below are some testing guidelines that must be followed while testing in a production environment:
- Create your own test data.
- The naming convention of test data should be realistic.
- Do not play with other existing user’s data.
- Create your credentials to access the application.
- Never try load test on a production environment.
- Test only if there is less load on the application.
Advantages of Testing in Production Environment –
The ultimate goal of Testing in Production environment is to ensure that the application is stable and runs the way it is expected to in the production environment. Daily production testing gives confidence to the developers that the application runs smoothly and hassle free.
Here are some advantages of Testing in Production environment:
- Monitor the application’s performance in real-time scenarios where the test cases are not predefined, and the user keeps changing data.
- Run edge cases in real-time to detect network failure, weak connections and interruption by call.
- Monitor the API responses at a peak traffic.
- Detect bugs and malicious attacks which typically goes unnoticed while testing on QA environment.
- Helps in maintaining the quality of the application for superior user experience.
I wonder if developers should write “unit” tests to run in production, running for all code execution, with assertions that the results were in line with expectations?