Why is it called “game day”? [closed]

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At several companies the term "game day" is used to mean testing functionality of a product in a production (or similar) environment. Specifically, testing a that an intended mechanism works as expected.

An example would be shutting down a master database and see that the replica database is being used instead.

But why is this called "game day"? Is it a sports analogy? Neither of the words make sense to me in isolation: it rarely takes a day, and it's no more game-like than anything else at work.

Answer 1

It's a sports analogy. "Game day"¹ is defined as:

The day on which a particular sports event, especially a football game, takes place.

For a sports team is the day when teams have to put all their training to the test and see if all that training paid off. It's the time when a team either triumphs or fails. There's no going back, no extra time. It's do or die.

Your production push / testing is largely the same. It's time to see if all your preparation has paid off and things work out. It's probably a term chosen because whoever is using it is familiar with sports and it's a roughly equivalent thing.

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_{¹ from https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/game_day. Apparently its an American term as well.}