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Discussion on: Should you have a staging server for testing?

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Aazar Khan

I think having staging server can greatly benefit you down the road specially if the project is a bit on the large side and involves a lot of data. I am working with a client for a Dynamics AX 365 Implementation and having a UAT (staging) environment has proved to be beneficial time and time again.

A few instances where having a staging server proved useful:

  • Having a client (or even our own QAs) test out a new feature.
  • Reproducing a production bug (testing the patch or resolving it on staging through the AX user interface).

This way we are more confident when doing something over production because we have already tested it out on a near production environment (staging server).

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Lukáš Doležal

Hi. It's interesting but I wonder about this:

Having a client (or even our own QAs) test out a new feature

Cannot you use feature flags for that instead? How do you give access to staging to customer and is it not risky? And then how do you manage keeping long lived "beta features" in staging - i.e. how do you then make other parallel changes without deploying the beta feature?