Change freeze and staging environment

[CM-AUS]

With the upcoming freeze for the end of the finiancial year - i have had several change requests raised for work in the staging environment.

Is it best practice to allow these to proceed?

our stg env is outside of all live traffic - its just for blowout of dev work.

Thanks

CM-AUS

[Corde Wagner]

Generally, a “freeze” is in place to protect the environment from disruptions/incidents that would be caused by a change. Although it’s not completely clear how many environmental stages your changes progress through, if your “staging” environment is the next closest environment to your production environment, then by change management best practices I subscribe to, the next closest to production is the one that is closest to production would not allow changes during a production freeze.

In some freeze situations where I was the change manager, we allowed for changes to lower level environments as a means of allowing for initial testing, but would not allow the change to progress up and into the higher level environments (staging and production in this scenario).

Example of lower to higher environments: developer workstation --> sandbox --> test --> staging --> production