new features, improvements, and technical upgrades... need to be experienced in the wild to guide their evolution. We need to live with them... to see whether what seemed like a good idea is actually a good idea.
To this end, we run six different beta servers that all point to the same production database. We've found it impossible to accurately evaluate a feature unless it's being used in anger with real data that actually matters. Evaluating changes against a staging server that's running an old copy of the database just doesn't cut it...
To select a given beta server, we've added a drop-down to all... staff accounts within [our app] itself.
