Dev, Staging, and Production

The last dimension is important because it tackles workflows instead of the type of application you're building. When we say development, staging, and production, these are loose labels and can mean a range of different stages in your development life cycle. The thing to take note of is that staging follows development, and production follows staging. If you're already in production, there is a 99% chance that you're not just going to be running evals on production workflows, because it also ties back to both development and staging.

Similarly, if you're in dev and now you're in staging, or perhaps released in beta, whatever label you want to give it, what happens is you're not just doing staging, but you're also preparing for production and already doing whatever development workflow you have for testing.

Lastly, if you're just in development, then all you have to do is focus on iterating fast and making sure that you have the infrastructure in place for setting up evaluation. That doesn't mean you need to have all your metrics figured out. Oftentimes, teams still in staging don't have that luxury of time. What you want to do, as we mentioned in prior chapters, is have tracing in place so that when you're ready to scale, you can do that without having to worry about data that you could have tracked but didn't.