5 Worst Ways of Managing Your Test Environment

1. 5 Worst Ways of Managing Your Test Environment

2. 5 Worst Ways of Managing Your Test Environment The numerous components and the complexity of required configuration to set up a well-designed test environment need a thorough and effective test environment management strategy in place. Not having one can lead to absolute chaos during the testing phase of a software development lifecycle, thus, affecting the efficiency and viability of the test results. As testing approach varies with each code requirement, a standard test environment does not hold ground strongly. It is critical that a test environment is customized based on the requirements of the particular code under analysis. Designing, configuring, and setting up a test environment is a tricky game, more so due to the number of variables involved. This calls for employment of a robust test environment management strategy and a skilled test environment manager to implement it. Test Environment Management (TEM) is considered among the top 7 challenges in application development and deployment. While test environment is a platform setup comprising of the needed software and hardware, configured as per the desired specifications for a particular test, test environment management involves overseeing this arrangement to ensure that a test is run smoothly. Typically, a test environment may involve a software that needs to be tested, an operating system to run the test, a testing server and database, configured test data, configured network connectivity, hardware devices, test framework tools and automation tools, third party software, interfaces between systems and applications, simulators, necessary documents such as user manuals and licenses, etc.

3. 5 Worst Ways of Managing Your Test Environment A test environment facilitates end-to-end visibility into a testing cycle, while aligning all the involved components into order to yield the desired test output. To orchestrate the level of seamlessness vital for a robust test environment, Test Environment Management is critical. Setting up a test environment is an expensive affair. However, an efficacious TEM strategy can significantly bring down the testing costs, while delivering higher ROI. Although, the road to successful test environment management is not free from obstacles, the destination is certainly worth those roadblocks. Let us try to understand the worst practices for test environment management that one must avoid: Designing a Test Environment with Ambiguous Requirements: Designing a test environment without first understanding the requirements will lead to a serious gap between what was needed and what is delivered. If the test environment manager does not have clarity on what they are expected to build and deploy, they might end up serving oranges to someone who wanted avocados. A test environment misaligned with the requirements may have a different set of configurations, hardware, software, and servers than what was necessary to perform a given test. This misalignment will not only cause the test to fail but will also result in further increase in the testing budgets as well as expensive delay in the delivery schedule.

4. 5 Worst Ways of Managing Your Test Environment Testing in an Environment that Varies a lot from Production Environment The different types of test environment, used for various levels of testing, are – development environment, testing/QA environment, staging environment, and production environment. Development environment is essentially used by the developers themselves to perform unit testing on the codes they write before passing them on to the next stage. Testing/QA environment is where regression testing is conducted to ensure that the new feature addition does not affect the existing ones. This environment is also used to perform other functional and non-functional testing, as required. Read Full Blog at: https://www.cigniti.com/blog/test-environment-management-best-practices/