Test Environment Best Practices: 8 You Need to Know

Test environments are crucial for ensuring that software changes work properly before being released to all users. While testing in production is encouraged at LaunchDarkly using feature flags, some use cases warrant pre-production test environments. This article explores best practices for setting up and navigating these test beds, including building communication into the environment, configuring bug tracing and solution life cycles, leveraging feature flags to test in production, encouraging early testing to shorten error logs, recycling test environments and resources, following a software development life cycle (SDLC) for software testing, and considering testing as a part of deployment. Feature flags can reduce the risk of testing in production dramatically, making it safe to start testing very early in an app's development timeline.