Category

Best Practices and Innovations

Title
Test Environment Management

Introduction

To ensure successful software deployment, it is crucial to have a stable environment dedicated to

testing. This allows failures to be consistently and accurately recreated and ensures that the
software under test will behave the same way in production.

The body

Test environment management is the process by which test machines (clients, servers) are
managed. It's very important to have clean machines when running any sort of tests. Where in
our project we have lot of physical or virtual machines (VMs) for running tests.

In our project we keep getting builds/patches every now and then. In order to test with very less
time,test environment management helped us to achieve. Like we take the Image of the
environment with different applications available on each image. Based on the requirement we
use the suitable image and go further with the new build. So having an image will reduce the
uninstall time of the huge application

While planing for test environment one should keep the following test strategies & approaches so
that the desired test environment can be provided.

• Significantly improved lab operations,

1. Improves scheduling, focuses resources on test execution, and
enhances
2. visibility and agility
3. Simplifying communication of real-time product test information
4. Meeting industry quality standards (ISO 17025 and so forth)
5. Effortlessly producing billing, metric and other specialized reports
• Self-service, reducing the burden on lab operations of providing real-time
visibility
into the current state of play of their activities,
• Documents, by resource (who, what and when) in a single source historical
repository,
• Standardized process and procedures in compliance with managerial, legal
and
operational requirements
• A catalyst for and means of eliminating non-value added activities
What

Conclusion

Being a vendor or supplier who is preparing or supplying a software product to its customer must
be very clear that in what environment his customer is planning to run this product. The
environment could be the hard side – i.e. the hardware configuration comprising of hardware
server and users PC components viz – hard disk size, its speed, RAM – size and speed,
Processor, bus speed etc. in the soft side it will comprise of the Server/ Users PCs Operating
System and its version, OS Patches requirements, Browser – which all browsers are supported
and which versions, IIS server specifications at server end, Database Server – What database
and which version or release. Any other software components required at server or users
computers. The purpose is to run this software as if it is being used by the client at his site.

The second purpose to have the test environment separate to development environment is to
restrict developer’s intervention in test environment during the test phase. This is to be done so
that the test results are clear, real and non-ambiguous.

Keeping the above factors and advantages it is always good to have proper planing of test
environment management. So the the test team can avoid time consumption and finding the
defects in later stages.

Learning Objective - Why it is important to your audience?

For global management:

• Visibility, resulting in the ability to act quickly and leverage resources,

thereby
increasing utilization and the likelihood of meeting the product goals for
timing
and quality,
• A means of eliminating non-value added activities,
• Alerts of key accomplishments and failures, and the downstream ripples of
those same accomplishments and failures,
• The basis for real time metrics to judge the relative performance of the
labs.

For customers:

• Visibility, resulting in the ability to act quickly, thereby increasing the

likelihood of meeting the product goals for timing and quality,
• Self-service visibility into the project status and resource bottlenecks,
• Alerts of key accomplishments and failures,
• Flexibility to modify test plans, yet still track to due dates, and
• Visibility into test details and attributes to quickly identify test results that
are
valid for other projects.