Some companies I’ve worked with have different forms of testing environments, including QA (Quality Assurance), IAT (Internal Acceptance Testing), and UAT (User Acceptance Testing). What they are called doesn’t matter, so long as they exist.
In a typical IT deployment, whether using Waterfall, Agile, or other development methodologies of the month, it pays to have a basic development → test → production deployment path.
Randolph explains it in some detail but one of the big benefits for me is that you can make sure that deployment process works before deployment time. Knowing that your checked-in scripts won’t break the deployment (because they didn’t break the CI build and release) makes the release process a lot less stressful.