So here is our problem:

We have a small team of developers with their own ways of doing things-- I am trying to formalize a process in which we are required to promote our code in the following order:

Local sandbox > Dev > UAT > Staging > Live

Developers develop/test as they go on their own sandbox, Dev is its own box that we would use for continuous integration, UAT is another site in IIS on the dev box, which uses our dev database. We then promote to staging, which is a site in IIS on the Live box and using live data (just like the live, hence staging). Then, finally, we promote to live.

Here are a few of my questions:

1.) Does this seem to be best practice? If not, what needs to be done differently?

2.) How do I enforce the rules to the developers? Often developers skip steps in order to save time... this should not be tolerated and would be great if it could be physically enforced.

3.) How do I enforce these rules to the business group? The business group just wants to get features out FAST. Do we promote only on certain days?

Thanks!

Josh