Posts

Showing posts from July, 2015

Non-Production Environments: Anti-Patterns

Introduction   We all know that clean, separated environments are critical for developing and testing our software.  And yet somehow we tend to get it wrong, often.  The Continuous Delivery movement puts this at the forefront of its concerns, which is great.  So if you're headed down the CD path, chances are you are tackling or are about to tackle the "environment problem".  Because it's a tough thing to get right and because it involves up-front and continuous investment, it tends to be de-emphasized in the feature-crazed Agile world.  But unless you're just doing a proof-of-concept, not solving the environment problem will slow you down, hurt quality and become harder to fix over time.  There are a few anti-patterns that I see over and over: Not giving proper attention to the data tier(s) of the stack (e.g. relational database, NoSQL database, text/search database, file systems used for storage, etc.) Not extending environments "all the way out&quo