Agilish

Some organizations decide to maintain only two environments: Development and UAT. The reasoning usually sounds practical. One fewer environment to maintain. One fewer pipeline to manage. One less budget line to defend. In practice, it eliminates the one thing that makes a pre-production release testable. When QA and UAT are the same environment, in-progress work and release candidates sit side by side. Business stakeholders doing acceptance testing are looking at code that may not even be part of the upcoming release. External partners are testing against something that does not represent what production will look like. Most critically, there is no stable, controlled place to validate the actual release before it ships. The result is that the final validation happens in production. Nobody sets out to test in production — but many organizations end up there because they removed the environment that would have prevented it. UAT as Your Most Valuable Diagnostic Tool Con...