Should we deploy our extension for Oracle Sales in the Redwood User Experience to test before deploying to production?

Yes. Here are some best practice recommendations.

1. Preview your extension in Oracle Visual Builder Studio. (VB Studio is typically paired with the test environment.)
2. Build (package and deploy) to the test environment so that users can validate the extension without going through VB Studio's preview mode. The package step introduces some optimizations to the code that aren't present in the preview mode.
3. Deploy to production.

As a best practice have a dedicated branch for production builds (package and deploy). You can move the code from the test environment's main branch to this production branch when it passes the second test. This configuration makes it possible for you to move forward in the test environment, while still being able to create an emergency fix for production without including everything in development from the test environment's main branch.