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Reduce the level of risk when deploying new eCommerce content

November 25, 2014 Written by NetSphere Category: It Just Makes Good Business Sense
Reduce the level of risk when deploying new eCommerce content

eCommerce is one of the fastest-growing industries today. New competitors are constantly entering the arena, and current business owners are feeling the squeeze. To stay in the game, businesses must be able to quickly scale to meet customers’ ever-growing demands.

Implementing new features and functionality is a great way to enhance the customer experience, but it can also take a toll on a website’s performance. Therefore, as a website takes on more content, the No. 1 priority is to ensure that it remains stable. And this is when it’s key to work with experienced, eCommerce developers.   

To get an idea of what an IT team might do when tasked with the responsibility of keeping a site stable, we surveyed the developers at NetSphere Strategies. Unsurprisingly, they essentially all gave the same, resounding recommendation: establish a robust deployment and testing strategy. And that's because publishing new features and functionality before testing their effects on a site carries a fair amount of uncertainty. Testing them in a separate environment first, however, can significantly reduce the level of risk of introducing bugs into a site.

To implement a sure-fire deployment and testing strategy, the NetSphere Strategies developers delivered three major suggestions:

1. Designate a QA team

A dedicated QA team could include one or more QA personnel who will be responsible for creating and maintaining test plans as well as coordinating deployment and testing projects between the development staff and management. A dedicated QA team will also be responsible for QA-related tasks, such as coordination and documentation of the testing process, tracking changes in requirements and an overall focus on rigorous QA processes applied to all changes to production.

2. Establish multiple testing sites

It’s not too far-fetched to imagine that there are often a variety of users requiring different testing capabilities at the same time where one change can unknowingly impact another. Therefore, it’s ideal to have multiple test environments – and test environments of different types.

A quality assurance server can be used for testing and previewing changes in a non-staging environment before those changes are propagated to production. This environment can be used to test regular updates currently deployed to eliminate the risk of misinterpreted results during testing arising from other deployed changes. This type of server can also be useful for testing longer term projects or conducting experimental testing. In this way, a clear separation of the workflow that is destined for production is retained from those changes that will necessarily undergo several rounds of deployment and review.

A staging environment should also be employed to ensure that stability remains in place for a site as it closely mimics the production environment and therefore ensures that changes run correctly here will also run correctly in production. This server is the last stop in the process of migrating changes to production. Also, if the server is setup to do so, the changes in the staging environment can be directly propagated to the production environment, rather than introducing potential variables in the process by manually copying or deploying them.

The staging environment will also be where data updates, such as the publishing of new products, are deployed first. These changes are frequent, automated and are often on short notice, needing to be pushed through to test and onto production with rapid turnover. Therefore, an additional benefit to deploying data changes to the staging server is that multiple data deployments to staging can be consolidated into a single deployment to production, making the administration easier. 

Finally, a load testing environment will be beneficial, as well. In some cases, a staging server will be an exact match to production. In others it is not. When it’s not, it’s recommended that one of the test environments be set up to exactly mirror production to understand how a site will behave under peak load conditions.

3. Stay committed to the strategy

Formalizing the testing and deployment processes will inevitably reduce the risk of introducing errors to production and will also bolster the efficiency of manual processes. To accomplish the goal and maintain an ongoing high level of quality, it requires qualified development staff just as much as it requires a dedication to consistency when managing and overseeing the process of adding new content to a site.   

For assistance implementing a deployment and testing strategy, contact the team at NetSphere Strategies. Our developers have 45 years of combined experience under their belts and can help with everything from developing a strategy to execution. Contact them to learn more.     

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Abbe Miller is the marketing manager at NetSphere Strategies, located just outside Chicago. NetSphere Strategies is a boutique eCommerce company positioned to help businesses transform their online presence by providing a full complement of services that starts with our strategic consulting and creative design teams, then continues with building innovative solutions and providing ongoing post-project support.