If you do not have a Staging environment read this to understand the benefits of it.

After you have a Staging environment, you need to make sure that it keeps up to date in every commit on the main branch.

Trunk Based Development

There are many ways to develop software using Git.
The two most popular ones are Git Flow and Trunk-Based Development.

If you are using Git Flow I recommend you to read more about Trunk-Based Development and move to that Git workflow.

When using Trunk-Based Development every developer writes codes against a pull request and then merges directly to the main branch.

Automation

After the code is merged to the main branch it should trigger a pipeline in your CI/CD.

The minimal workflow is to run the tests, build the services, and make a deploy updating staging environment.

This makes sure staging is always up to date with the latest changes. Making it easy for anybody on the team to test new changes.

Try to automate as much as possible, so you don't need to ask if the staging is up to date anymore.

In Conclusion

Using Trunk Based development, feature flags, and having an automated CI/CD in place can save many hours of your developers so they can focus on generating value for the customers.
An up to date staging is essential to avoid breaking production.

Resources

Trunk Based Development Atlassian
Trunk Based Development

Woovi
Woovi is a Startup that enables shoppers to pay as they like. Woovi provides instant payment solutions for merchants to accept orders to make this possible.

If you want to work with us, we are hiring!