Is Your Firm Following The Best Practices
For Test Environment Management?
A reliable and efficient test environment management method is crucial for supporting accurate application releases and on-time project delivery. Understanding test environments is essential, and without following the best practices, many businesses face several challenges due to poorly implemented test environment management practices.
What Is Test Environment Management?
Before we start deep-diving into the best practices, let’s understand the basics of test environment management.
If you have worked on any software system, you’ve most probably dealt with test IT environments. While preparing for a software launch, various hidden issues about these environments come forward.
For successful end-to-end testing of software applications, across multiple user channels, through distributed systems and various system interfaces, any company needs to possess the ideal IT environments, controlled modification, and customized support practices.
Professional services for Test Environment Management fulfil all these requirements.
Why Is Test Environment Management Is Necessary?
The unique stages of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) process include requirement analysis, design, development, testing, and continuous upgradation of the software modules.
In the entire SDLC process, the testing phase is the most crucial and delicate process. It determines the ultimate quality of the software getting released into the live IT environments.
Therefore, ensuring the test environments utilized for the software testing are reliable and as close to production as possible is vital.
Your company may bear certain expensive issues if you poorly manage your test environment.
- With a broader gap between the testing stage and production phase, the probability of the delivered product having more bugs increases. This doesn’t just lead to poor quality of code but also causes product failures in live IT environments.
- If IT infrastructure assets are poorly managed, it may lead to budget increments and testing process delays.
- Poor administration and control of IT management tools and IT environment assets leads to faulty configuration and change control.
- Due to misaligned test infrastructure and production environments, root cause analysis of incidents and bugs becomes problematic.
- Due to time constraints or budget limitations, many organizations assign testing responsibility to the application developers or instructs testers to test the code directly in the production phase. This not only leads to accountability concerns but also subjects the entire software development process at grave risk.
- Mostly test teams clone or extract the production data and utilize it for testing. This method is prone to errors, time-consuming, and may violate the data protection policies. Further, it isn’t change-controlled and cannot be audited.
- During any step of the software development lifecycle, communication has a vital role to play. Poor communication may lead to misunderstanding of the testing requirements or business objectives. It may also fail to detect critical bugs.
- Configuration of bug tracking tools and their lifecycle management needs to be done diligently. Assigning bug detection and management to the wrong teams results in missing out on important information. Consequently, time and money get wasted while more defects arise at later stages.
Detecting bugs or fixing them is much easier and less time-consuming at the early phases of the software development cycle rather than at the more advanced steps. It also requires a higher expenditure for managing bugs in the production stage than managing them in earlier phases, such as the testing stage. Therefore, test environment management is extremely crucial in the SDLC, and organizations need to consider this seriously.
Test Environment Management Best Practices
- Don’t just package and publish your codes, do the same for your test environments: pre-configure testing tools and environment.
- Align pre-configured assets with production
- Develop a centralized destination to track and schedule environment usage and for avoiding conflicts.
- Eliminate bottlenecks by empowering your team with self-service.
