Where I work we have 3 environments for our product: Test, Mirror, Production.
Test is used for development purposes. Mirror is used for feature promotion, staging, and sometimes we share this environment with our key users so they can conduct UAT. Production is our live server.
For regular deployments to Production, we use this process:
- Functional testing for new features & bug fixes on the test server
- If all validated, promote to deploy to Mirror
- Regression testing for existing features in Mirror
- If all validated, promote to deploy to Production
- Smoke testing in Production
For hotfixes, is there a standard lightweight version of this process, and if so what is it?
It seems excessive to regress all features in Mirror for hotfix deployments.