The best location to test a newly released feature for an internal application, without affecting the production environment, is the staging environment. Here’s a detailed explanation:

Staging Environment: This environment closely mirrors the production environment in terms of hardware, software, configurations, and settings. It serves as a final testing ground beforedeploying changes to production. Testing in the staging environment ensures that the new feature will behave as expected in the actual production setup.

Isolation fromProduction: The staging environment is isolated from production, which means any issues arising from the new feature will not impact the live users or the integrity of the production data. This aligns with best practices in change management and risk mitigation.

Realistic Testing: Since the staging environment replicates the production environment, it provides realistic testing conditions. This helps in identifying potential issues that might not be apparent in a development or testing environment, which often have different configurations and workloads.