Livstester

Livstester is a term used in software development to describe a tester who conducts testing in live production environments, rather than solely in dedicated staging or test environments. The concept encompasses both individuals and teams whose role is to validate software behavior under real user conditions and real data, in order to detect issues that may not appear in controlled test settings.

Etymology and usage vary by region. The word blends the Scandinavian word liv (life or live) with tester from English, and it is most commonly encountered in Nordic tech contexts. There is no single formal definition across industries, and the exact responsibilities of a livstester can differ between organizations.

Roles and methods. A livstester typically operates within or adjacent to release engineering, QA, or site reliability teams. They may perform manual exploratory testing on live features, observe real user flows, and verify that new code paths function as intended in production. Techniques associated with live testing include canary releases, feature flagging, and controlled production testing, as well as monitoring and telemetry to confirm expected outcomes while minimizing customer impact. Tools often involve observability platforms, real-time dashboards, and safeguards such as throttling, time-based rollbacks, and automatic alerts.

Governance and best practices. Live testing requires careful governance to protect data privacy and system stability. Practices emphasize limited scope, incremental exposure, clear rollback procedures, and robust monitoring. Verification in production is usually complemented by extensive pre-production testing to reduce risk.

See also. Canary testing, blue-green deployment, production monitoring, chaos engineering, post-release validation.