Learning testing in production

For some, the idea of testing in production seems contrary to how testing should be done. For a while, the best practice has been that testing should never be done in production: the impact and cost of finding out that features do not work as expected are far too expensive by the time the feature is already in a customer-facing environment. The potential negative impact to both the bottom line and the time taken to build and deliver a feature makes it a very wasteful approach.

However, when feature management is used, the practice of testing in production removes all that risk. In fact, dynamically enabling features for customers in a production environment does not just make this approach safer, but in several ways, it is actually superior to testing features and functionality on any other environment.

Testing in this manner relies heavily on the use of temporary feature flags, as by their very nature, they are designed to help get new functionality...