Best test environment management practices to consider

2. Developing a high-quality software product and releasing it on time is a crucial thing in this cut-throat competition era. • Software organizations are trying really hard to ensure that they release high-quality products that are bug-free and perform well to serve the core purpose. • Establishing IT test environments and managing them can make things easy for organizations, but it is not as easy as it seems. • IT environment managementis a challenging task and you need to take several steps to achieve the objective. • In this post, we will discuss some of the best IT environment management practices that can help organizations to ensure high-quality, highly functional, carefully tested and error-free software products released in a timely manner. Stay tuned!

3. Make a team of test environment management • First and foremost thing you need to do is to establish an in-house team for test environment management who can take complete ownership. • This team is the single point of contact for all test related processes and activities and is the sole responsible for test environment management. • In the case of shared ownership models, we often see lack of accountability, poor management and irregular maintenance. • However, when you have a dedicated team for test environment management,you will be able to eliminate all these issues.

4. Implementing thorough documentation • If you want to manage multiple test environments, you need to make a habit of thorough documentation of all the processes, actions and steps such as resource allocation, various configurations, team-wise responsibility sharing and incidents. • A test environment manager will be responsible for this detailed documentation. From acquiring and allocating test environment management tools to allocating other resources to monitoring progress of each team, the manager will ensure that everything is documented perfectly which can be shared internally to make processes more effective and quick. • It will also help the organization to use this documented data in the future when similar projects arrive.

5. Standardization of language and terminology: • Using different terminologies is not a wise thing as it confuses stakeholders. • It is important that the test environment manager ensures the same terminology is used throughout the project to avoid confusions and misinterpretations. • It has been seen that different test and development teams use different terminologies internally, but the documentation becomes hard to interpret. • When the terminology is the same, it is easy to manage the test environments. • Also, language standardization will ensure quick and better understanding among teams which will result in sharing information quickly and efficiently.

6. Knowledge management • Sharing available information and knowledge to all stakeholders and end users is an important thing to implement. • Establishing a centralizedtest environment managementteam will ensure it. • From test environment schedules to plans to solution documents to status reports to recovery procedures, everything must be shared among teams to make quick and right decisions. Automation • Developing automation frameworks can improve the efficiency of test environments and this should be the first priority of the test environment manager. • You can usetest environment management toolsavailable to achieve it. Activities you can automate are management of test data, auto provisioning and auto deployments and service virtualization.

7. Conclusion • Managing multiple test environments, sometimes more than hundreds, is a difficult and challenging task. • However, you can overcome these challenges by keeping a sharp eye on details and planning in advance. • Test environment managementis an important objective to achieve to ensure better delivery of high-quality software products.