(Talk given at PIPELINE Conference 2016, London https://pipelineconf.info/2016-event/speakers/)

Do you really need that staging environment? They say “”don’t test in prod”” but sometimes you can and you should. There it sits attracting quirks and cruft, and it never actually gives you the confidence to deploy that it promises. But surely it’s reckless to abandon it? If you apply practices like feature flags, dark launches, branch-by-abstraction, backoff and circuit breakers you may find you don’t need that staging environment after all.

Dave Nolan has been passionate about continuous delivery since reading about Gossamer Condor as a kid. He’s interested in learning organisations, programming things, and exploring cities. He is currently CTO of Appear Here, the online marketplace for commercial letting. Dave is indicative of a larger problem.