Environments are like restaurants

At Standard Code, we make use of multiple environments when developing a tool for you. We often have three environments: development, staging and production. Think of these different environments like a restaurant, and our developers are chefs. The development environment is similar to a test kitchen where our chefs can try new recipes to add to the menu. Some will be great, and some not so great! But that's okay, because this is a test kitchen, and the public hasn't been introduced to any new menu items yet - but they will soon. Once a chef finds several recipes that she likes, she'll open a pop-up restaurant where people can taste the food in an almost real setting. This is what we call the staging environment. Real people will try real food, and they'll give feedback on what they liked and what they didn't like. The chef will take all of this feedback into consideration and make some tweaks to her recipes before she introduces the new menu items into the restaurant, which is like our production environment. The Production environment is the real live tool that contains functionality that's been carefully crafted (in a dev environment) and rigorously tested (in a staging environment). But it doesn't end there, just like a restaurant gathers feedback from their guests and adjusts their menu items accordingly, we're continuously improving our tools by gathering feedback from users that are actively using the tool in production and making tweaks according to their suggestions.