Back in 2004 when I was working for a big adult content site I had some really boring tasks…I had to actually test in production the system to be sure was working fine since was extremely unstable.
Those years were horrible we did a migration to ASP.NET and the developers + the platform were not ready and our servers couldn’t handle the traffic. I spent months optimizing scripts, SQL queries, I created a homemade CDN a cache system…etc…
But still the system was not really stable, so every day during 7 months I was doing the same tests.
Trust me it’s a really useful thing to do tests in productions specially if you move millions of users per day as we had, also our users immediately after any problem they will report but that of course is not nice and you lose money…
Back then I was able to create some scripts that could test some of our features and automate the tasks. Still I had plenty of things to try every day.
Now a days there’s plenty of ways of testing (or doing regressions) in production or test. Life is easier and is not that difficult.
Probably one of the most famous ones is SeleniumHQ you don’t need to be a technical person to install a FireFox extension and “record” an action to repeat. This is a bit rudimentary, but you could automate them even further. Is a life saver.
Also consider to use any tool to monitor your site as commented in previous chapters.
UPDATE: check you will love it https://travis-ci.org/