Staging Environment

Definition

The staging environment is any development environment that is primarily used to stage tested applications prior to their deployment to the production environment.

Objectives

The typical objectives of the staging environment are to provide a separate environment for the:

• Content management team to incorporate approved content prior to publication to the content management production environment.
• User experience team to perform system usability testing.
• Customer representatives to evaluate the completeness, quality, and general status of the tested application prior to deployment.

Benefits

The typical benefits of the staging environment include:

• Content problems can be found prior to publication in the production environment.
• System usability testing can be performed in its own realistic environment without slowing down system and launch testing.
• Customer representatives can evaluate the tested application without slowing down testing and deployment.

Contents

The typical contents of the reuse environment are:

• Hardware Components:
  • Clients
  • Firewalls
  • Routers
  • Web servers
  • WAP servers
  • Security servers
  • Application servers
  • Database servers
  • Disk or tape libraries
  • Local area networks
• Software Components:
  • Application software
  • Operating systems
  • Browsers
  • Web and Application server software

Stakeholders

The typical stakeholders of the staging environment are:

• Producers:
  • Environments Team
• Evaluator:
  • Environments Inspection Team
• Approvers:
  • Technical Leader
  • Project Manager
  • Customer Representative
• Maintainers:
  • Environments Team
• Users:
  • Content management team, which uses the staging environment to incorporate approved content prior to publication.
  • User experience team, which uses the staging environment to perform system usability testing.
  • Customer representatives, which use the staging environment to incrementally evaluate the tested application prior to deployment.

Phases

• Business Strategy: Not Applicable
• Business Optimization: Not Applicable
• Initiation: Not Applicable
• Construction: Completed
• Delivery: Maintained
• Usage: Maintained
• Retirement: Archived

Preconditions

The staging environment can typically be started if the following preconditions hold:

• The environments team is adequately staffed and trained.
• The staging environment section of the project environments description document exists.
• System testing has started.

Inputs

The typical inputs to the staging environment include:

• Work Products:
  • Project Environments Description Document
• Stakeholders:
  • Content Management Team, which provides their needs for performing content management.
  • User Experience Team, which provides their needs for perform system usability testing.
  • Customer Representatives, who provides their needs for performing incremental evaluation of the tested application prior to deployment.
  • Process Team, which ensures that the staging environment supports the necessary aspects of the project process.

Guidelines

• Although it is better to have a separate staging environment, cost constraints may force a single physical environment to implement multiple logical environments including the staging environment.
• To make the evaluation as relevant and useful as possible, the staging environment should be as similar to the production environment environments as is practical.

Conventions

The staging environment is typically constrained by the following conventions:

• Staging Environment Inspection Checklist

Examples

• Not applicable.