Should Development / Testing / QA / Staging environments be similar?
- by Walter White
Hi all,
After much time and effort, we're finally using maven to manage our application lifecycle for development. We still unfortunately use ANT to build an EAR before deploying to Test / QA / Staging.
My question is, while we made that leap forward, developers are still free to do as they please for testing their code. One issue that we have is half our team is using Tomcat to test on and the other half is using Jetty. I prefer Jetty slightly over Tomcat, but regardless we using WAS for all the other environments.
My question is, should we develop on the same application server we're deploying to?
We've had numerous bugs come up from these differences in environments. Tomcat, Jetty, and WAS are different under the hood. My opinion is that we all should develop on what we're deploying to production with so we don't have the problem of well, it worked fine on my machine. While I prefer Jetty, I just assume we all work on the same environment even if it means deploying to WAS which is slow and cumbersome.
What are your team dynamics like? Our lead developers stepped down from the team and development has been a free for all since then.
Walter
