Test new functions in production

I like having other people test stuff for me. I’m a test manager, that’s what I do for a living.

I like even better having the customer test what they have requested by my company for me. That gives an absolute feedback on the quality we have produced.

So far this kind of testing have been the norm in “customer environment”, but as we who have tested all know, there are always something different from one environment to the next(different network, hardware etc etc).

So the most correct place to test new functions is production. Postponing these kind of “acceptance” to after the production setting, gives lots of Test and Quality assurance people the shivers. Why? Their job is usually to know the status of things before decisions makers give the go/nogo for production.

In agile world, most of the releases going to production are small and usually add-ons to already used function. And these new functions nobody are using yet. So the risk of having errors on untested functions are sometimes high, but the impact is extremely low.

I as far as I have experienced, customers requested something, like to be the first to try it.

Risk is higher, but the feedback on bugs are better, more reliable and correct, and time to market is a lot shorter.

Skip all environments, put the customers in the driving seat and test it in production.