Development on Production System

[cyberface]

I've not been able to reply to posts for a while - getting 'page not found'. We've all seen various other snags.

Perhaps it's because of my background in software development (for financial organisations) but active development on production servers is IMO unprofessional. It's not even releasing untested code here by the looks of things - it's changing stuff that then breaks other pages on the fly.

It's not my business or my call but can anyone explain the rationale behind doing this? I know it's 'ONLY' a web forum, but when people spend 10 minutes composing a post only to lose it to newly-introduced bugs or missing pages then it gets very frustrating.

[PetrolTed]

To an extent you're right, I did release some code last week that should have been more thoroughly tested.

Things were compounded yesterday by a failure of one of our databases. That was to explain for many pages being unavailable etc.

We're switching from an environment where I used to do all the development, maintenance and support into one where there are more hands on the system and we therefore do need more procedures in place to reflect what should be a more mature environment going forwards. That review is underway and in the meantime it's just a case of me being more rigorous myself.

Edited by PetrolTed on Monday 30th April 10:43

[cyberface]

Fair enough Ted, thanks for the reply. I presume that when you were running the whole show you didn't have a test environment that was an exact replica of the prod system, but now there's Haymarket money I'd really hope that they can provide an exact test environment that's replicated from prod regularly.

IME the vast majority of annoyingly difficult to track down bugs are caused when the test environment is a different spec / hardware / software environment than production and all testing is done on the test environment... usually the developer's overloaded PC...