What is a Staging Environment?

A staging environment is crucial in the software development process as it serves as the final step before an application gets deployed in a production environment. It closely resembles a production environment, allowing for testing of software updates to ensure quality and identify potential issues before release. Staging environments are used to conduct various tests such as unit testing, regression testing, integration testing, and chaos testing. They play a key role in development but have limitations in fully replicating every possible scenario. Feature flags can help test in production by enabling or disabling specific functionalities without the need to deploy code, allowing for quick rollback of problematic features.