In order to have a smooth CI experience, it is important to ensure that the test and production environments are identical. Both environments should have similar hardware and operating system configurations, as well as environment setup.
Also, for applications that use databases, both the test and production environments should have the same versions. The runtimes and libraries should also be similar. However, sometimes it might not be possible to test in every instance of the production environment, such as desktop applications, but you must ensure that a replica of the production environment is used in testing.
