Two paths through the same incident.
Without the Doppelgänger
- 1
Update
An update of the payment plugin changes a setting. Everything works in the consumer store, but in the B2B sales channel the “invoice” payment method fails.
- 2
Weeks 1 to 3
Nobody tests the B2B channel. Wholesale customers first order by email, then not at all.
- 3
After 3 weeks
A buyer calls.
With the Doppelgänger
- 1
Before every update
On the copy, the complete checkout runs with every payment method in the providers’ test mode.
- 2
Every morning
In the live store, a test order goes through every sales channel, up to your providers’ payment page, without any money changing hands. A broken B2B channel shows up the next morning, not after three weeks.
I meet automated attacks with automated defense: updates go out quickly and regularly, but only after a test on an exact copy of the website.
What the incident costs.
More case studies
The agency was on the server
For a promotion, an outside agency changed files directly on the server. With the next update, the promotion was gone.
Nobody did it
After a new feature went in, the product search found nothing anymore. Nobody knew who had changed what.
A thousand pages nobody wrote
Google suddenly showed thousands of pages with Japanese ads for the company website.
A typical course of events, assembled from real incidents. Figures are example calculations based on the stated assumptions.