Why Did We Kill Our Test Environment?

A company eliminated its test environment in favor of a continuous deployment strategy, where code is merged and goes directly to production, leading to improved quality. Initially, their process involved coding, committing, and deploying to a test environment before production, but this proved inefficient and unreliable, occasionally resulting in production issues due to untested code. The team experienced quality challenges as the reliance on a test environment led to complacency among developers. By removing the test environment, developers gained a stronger sense of ownership and responsibility, testing their changes in a temporary development environment before direct deployment. This shift not only streamlined the deployment process but also resulted in better quality outcomes as nothing tests code more effectively than a production environment.