Yutaka's blog

Sprint Review in Production Environment

It might be controversial, but I believe that the Sprint Review for a web application should be conducted in the production environment, not staging. Ideally, the staging environment should be almost the same as production, but they usually differ. I lack confidence in our increment, even though the new behavior is verified in the staging environment. Additionally, I am concerned about the mindset that assumes it's acceptable if it works in the staging environment. This approach can spoil the team and result in delayed actual production deployment. Of course, the production deployment is usually planned, but work assumed as 'done' might be lower prioritized.

Furthermore, there have been many practices to ensure your work is correct in the production environment, even though it's still in progress: feature flags, canary releases, etc. The staging environment is, of course, useful, but it's better to demonstrate to your stakeholders in the production environment.