Good reading prior to my assuming a new position where I have a sizable team of application developers.
By Joe Olson at MSDN Blogs…
Although you may not find many references to dev, test, staging, environments, these are critical to large deployments. Even in the commodity type space where you are simply hosting the out of the box SharePoint code, it still very important if not critical to have a “test” environment where you can validate that the service pack installs, and the steps you follow work, and most important of all it works with your environment. If there’s a user error in the install how much better is it that you learn it on a non critical environment. There are slight differences to all these various stages to deployment. Some more critical than others. Let me provide some insight into the differences. For the record I’m not saying every environment needs all of these, all the time, but they should be considered and incorporated into your planning at various stages. Much of these deployments can be served by virtual environments, but when it comes to perf and figuring out load balancing and some elements to clustering it is helpful to have hardware you can use. I’ve been in some environments where this is a check out process where hardware or virtual images can be allocated temporarily during that phase of the project. More and more I do expect to see environments to move to virtual, but as with anything testing is a major element and even when doing things virtually you’ll find that RAM and CPU are still important elements, so you can’t scrimp.
via Pilots, Proof of Concepts, Test, and Pre Production Environments – Joel Oleson’s Blog – SharePoint Land – Site Home – MSDN Blogs.
