Serious software projects require several environments. Your production environment is obviously mission critical. A staging environment is also necessary to perform validation and regression testing before taking the risk of pushing an update to production. Best practices and approaches for managing these and other environments vary from organization to organization.
In some sense, different software systems should be expected to have unique needs. Yet certain commonalities and wisdom can be gained from observing high scale success stories.
In this episode, I interview Senthil Padmanabhan about how eBay turned around an impeding staging environment into its biggest asset for developer productivity.