Oh brother ... it's change management ...

I was really pleased to get such positive feedback on my article yesterday on testing proposed changes before they hit production. But special mention has to go to the following insight from Simon Talks, who is not only my brother, but a very successful Change Manager who is based in Sheffield, England ...

Hey Bro!

There is considerable value in what we term the pre-production environment.

The pre-production environment for us follows all the restrictions of the production environment and devs have no access it (as they should with production!!!).

For changes planned for production there is always a dry run on pre-production and some testing is ran against the pre-production environment.

Far more changes fail in pre-production even if they run in the development and test environments, due to complications in parallel development that usually enable releases to work that wouldn't work in the production environment.