Often it's desireable to have test environments to trial new code, perform user support, attempt to reproduce problems or error conditions, or for other purposes. Some thoughts on these environments:
Data population:
A number of schools use either synthetic data or snapshots of production (or subsets of production) data.
Synthetic data is likely more common in development environments with small data sets, as it's extremely time consuming and expensive to create useful, large, representative synthetic data set.
A midway point might be obfuscated production data, with sensitive details like personal information obscured or changed.
Environment:
Email: one key consideration, especially if using real data or obtaining data from sources like a University LDAP is preventing spurious notifications from going out to users.
- Sakai has a testMode@org.sakaiproject.email.api.EmailService=true to send email output to a log file to help prevent this
- Test mail servers may be setup to collect mail sent from Sakai if a more end-to-end test environment is desired.