In the context of ATF, in which environment should tests and suites be run?

• A. Non-production instances
• B. Production
• C. Development only
• D. Only in staging

Answer: (A)

Running ATF tests in non-production instances is essential because these automated tests interact with the system in ways that can create, modify, or delete data and simulate real user actions. If you run them in production, you risk impacting live users, corrupting data, or causing outages. By validating changes in development, test, and staging environments first, you get a controlled space to catch configuration or workflow issues, ensure test data is appropriate, and establish a reliable baseline for regression testing. Only after tests pass in non-production should you move changes through the deployment pipeline to production. The idea is to use non-production environments for testing, not production, and not restrict testing to a single non-prod stage.