Coming from an enterprise application background (PeopleSoft), I’m used to the dev-test-prod development paradigm:

• Develop and unit test in the dev environment
• Migrate and functional/integration test in the test environment
• Release to the prod environment

This is such a ingrained process to me that I thought maybe I should question whether it applies to web site development?

Stepping back for a moment, I believe the main reason you approach development this way is to mitigate risk. In other words don’t release to the world until something has been fully tested. Admittedly this seems like a very good idea if you are making a change to a process that updates customer accounts and a small  bug could lead to being out by a few million dollars. However, does it make as much sense in world of web development?

I believe it does. It lets you isolate a problem come up with a fix which you can then test before you release. If you couldn’t do this, say you simply created a fix in production what impact would it have? Well in most cases, probably none, but say your fix broke your entire site. Uh oh, now what? Restore from backup? When did you do the last backup … ?

Speaking of backups I think the two fall into exactly the same category: you use the dev-test-prod paradigm just in case your fix doesn’t work. Just like you backup your data just in case your hard drive crashes. So I’m sticking to it.