The last two weeks have been rather chaotic with the introduction of a whole set of new environments (one for User Acceptance testing, one for Performance testing, and one for our new Oracle database). We’ve had a number of issues moving to each of these environments, highlighted by both our own set of test suites and by our testing team.

Although all the new environments were supposed to be replicas of production, there were still many not-so-subtle and definitely unintentional and unnecessary differences (such as basic Oracle configuration of the NLS_DATE_FORMAT and NLS_TIMESTAMP_FORMAT values). Working with my, it-doesn’t-work-until-it’s-proven (with a test) attitude, has now lead to a whole new suite of “Environment Acceptance” tests that we can now run against each of these environments to further narrow our scope of debugging to just our code.

It is of great relief to have feedback should these things go awry again, but I’m now concerned that a whole other part of IT (operations management including people like systems and database administrators) may be lacking the discipline (or is it the awareness and importance?) of continuous integration and testing.