Well, the idea is that instead of logging into production, you log into your development environment, do the testing there--then you write a script that replicates what you just did. Lastly, you run the script on staging, and if that seems to work, then run it on production.
There's a pretty handy tool I use now (fabric: docs.fabfile.org) that makes it pretty simple.
How do you know that production environment and development environment are exact mirrors? I recognize you could image the production environment, but when setting up new applications I will make a variety of changes, especially during testing, which may require testing on the production server also.. especially since the production server is active and may not tolerate the changes the same way the development server will.
My point is, your method of "never logging into a production server" is extreme. You could have easily written a script for this and then by accident, executed it on the production server instead of on a testing server. Same problem manifests itself in a different manner.
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Well, the idea is that instead of logging into production, you log into your development environment, do the testing there--then you write a script that replicates what you just did. Lastly, you run the script on staging, and if that seems to work, then run it on production.
There's a pretty handy tool I use now (fabric: docs.fabfile.org) that makes it pretty simple.
How do you know that production environment and development environment are exact mirrors? I recognize you could image the production environment, but when setting up new applications I will make a variety of changes, especially during testing, which may require testing on the production server also.. especially since the production server is active and may not tolerate the changes the same way the development server will.
My point is, your method of "never logging into a production server" is extreme. You could have easily written a script for this and then by accident, executed it on the production server instead of on a testing server. Same problem manifests itself in a different manner.