Why experiment in production?
The production environment is the best place for you to be running your experiments as you are finding out tangible evidence about your technology and your customers. Other environments can also give you a good indication of how your technology will perform. Good customer research and modeling can provide a reliable indication of what customers want and how they will use the product, but neither is as reliable as actually finding out in production.
In addition to this, there are further opportunities that present themselves when using the production environment for validating technical and business hypotheses, such as trunk-based development, which will be explored in Chapter 7, Trunk-Based Development.
The kinds of experiments that are likely to be run in production differ from those that would normally be run in other environments. There are two types of features: those that will always form part of the product but need validation and those that...
