Currently, we are running a three stage environment of Dev, QA and Production and using promotion to move changes through the life cycle. Our currentl issue is per our methodology QA actually has an addition stage, User Acceptance Testing (UAT). To get the best productivity, we would like to start UAT as soon as QA does some standard sanity testing at which point we would like QA to continue their formal testing while the Users do theit UAT. So as to prevent the two groups tripping on each other we want them to use the same code base in separate environments adding an additionla UAT server to the current 3 stage model, so promotion would be DEV-->QA-->UAT-->Production.
Does anyone have a similar requirement and have they implemented this or another solution with success?
Thanks in Advance