Best Practice for "Testing" Changes in JIRA (Workflow development, for instance)

[Deleted user]

We have one-and-only-one "Production" Jira, so when I get a request for changing an existing custom field, adding a "Behavior" to support how that field will conditionally behave, and testing all the issue types that will be using it, here's what I do:

• Create a Copy of the existing custom field
  • Make the necessary changes to support the new usage of this field
• Create a Copy of the existing Field Configuration that uses the existing custom field
  • If the existing custom field was REQUIRED, make the Copy of the existing custom field also required. In fact, you may want to make the original custom field OPTIONAL, since it won't appear on the copied screens described next.
• Create Copies of the Screens that use this field
• Copy the workflows that will be using this field
• Create a new Behavior for conditions when this field will behave (make other fields required if it has a certain value)
  • Make sure (for test purposes) that the Behavior only executes for the copies of custom field (we don't want to alarm any Production users with these changes yet).
• Make changes to the Copies of Screens and Copies of workflows in support of the new usage
• Create a Copy of the Production Workflow Scheme
  • Introduce the new items described above into this workflow scheme copy.
• Create a Dummy Project that will use this new Workflow Scheme, for testing all the changes

Once all changes have been tested satisfactorily and ready to introduce to Production, do the following:

• Rename all the "Copy of...." items created above to reflect they are now the "Production" versions
• In the Production Workflow Scheme, add the new workflows to replace the originals they were copied from.
  • Make sure you also use the new Field Configurations, etc that will support this change.
• Lastly, (I think) you'll want to discard any of the old, original items that are now unneeded. 

The reason I'm posting this is because this was a change to a single field, and introducing a few new custom fields in a Production Jira environment. I don't think there's an easier way to do this. In fact, I think I'm forgetting a couple of steps that I had to perform when I was testing these changes with the Dummy Project and needed to "tweak" things to get the desired results. 

Would any of this have been easier if I had a Jira "Test" environment and did these things? I don't think so, because that would introduce the problems associated with "importing" workflows with "custom fields". I'm eager to hear from the Community, since this seemed like a whole lot of work for the changes we needed to implement, but I seriously can't think of how I could have done this any easier.