Why our test site follows the same rules as the real one
Every serious setup has two versions of a website. The real one your customers use, and a private practice copy where changes get built and tested before they go anywhere near the public. Basic sense. You do not rehearse on the live stage.
Two versions, and a trap
Never rehearse on the live stage.
But there is a catch in it that costs people real money, and we walked into it before we shut it off.
The catch is this. If your practice copy is even a bit more relaxed than the real thing, you get a false pass. Something gets built on the practice site, everything looks perfect, it is signed off, it goes live, and it breaks on the spot, because the live site enforces a safety rule the practice copy did not. You rehearsed on a stage with no trapdoors, then walked out onto one full of them.
It bit us
A page that passed on the practice site and broke live.
It bit us through a security setting. Live sites carry a set of strict rules about what a page is allowed to do, which browser features it can use, where it is allowed to load things from. Good, protective rules. But our practice copies were not enforcing those same rules. So a page could be built and tested clean on the practice site and then fall over the moment it hit the stricter live one. It happened, and it cost real bookings before we worked out why, because from the practice site everything had looked spot on.
The fix, dull done properly
Same strict rules, built from live so they cannot drift.
The fix is obvious once you name the problem, and dull to do properly, which is usually how you know it is worth doing. The practice copy of every site now carries the exact same strict rules the live one does, built from the live settings rather than typed out by hand so the two cannot quietly drift apart. If a change is going to trip over a live rule, it now trips over it on the practice site first, in private, where a broken page costs nothing but ten minutes of my time.
Every tradesman knows this
A soft test just flatters you.
Every tradesman knows this one without being told. You practise the way you are actually going to work. A test that is softer than the real thing is not a test, it is you patting yourself on the back, and it will happily wave you onto the stage with a problem you had every chance to catch.
Catching it here instead of in front of a customer is invisible when it works, which is why most people never bother with it. We bother.
For the techies
The short version of what actually sits under this.
This is how we build
We catch the breakage in private, before it ever reaches your customers. If you would rather it were done like this, say hello.
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