In the company where I work, we have 2 environments: test and production. We are not currently starting a new environment, because of cost.
Here is the procedure we follow: business makes a feature request, development makes it happen and deploys it on test environment. Then business tests it (UAT), and if it's OK, the feature will be included into next production deployment.
The problem is best practices for test DB. Developers treat test environment as their playground, and sometimes they reset the DB to initial state for testing purposes. On the other hand, business people think that test DB must be stable, and should not be reset. We would like to resolve this issue, and decide if test environment should belong to development team or business team. (Developers don't want business to put their nose in test env., but business team is paying for servers.)
What is the best practice about environments? Can you recommend an article about this?
At our company there are two databases too, a test and a production database. The test database is mainly used for testing by developers but sometimes for business tests too. This database is refreshed daily using an actual copy of the production database. So this database can be both a playground and a serious testing database. But a third, development, database is the best option. We had one, but it is broken at the moment. But when you get one of those, you should make sure it is refreshed often enough. When developers use it as a playground, it will stray away from the production environment, and its data will be both old and currupt. Because of this, developers won't be able to test well themselves. So make sure you refresh this database periodically (maybe daily too, or at least once a week).