5 Ways to Ensure Successful Test Environment Management

1. 5 Ways to Ensure Successful Test Environment Management

2. 5 Ways to Ensure Successful Test Environment Management The sprawling dominance of technology-driven processes in organizations today has impeccable testing and quality assurance to thank for. Quality assurance practices are necessary to employ and deploy a high-performing, glitch-free application, which can effectively result in an optimized course of action for overall improvement in the end results. Organizations are adopting the shift-left approach and continuous testing strategy to enhance an application’s quality and reduce the possibility of failure after deployment. Software testing is a tricky process due to the involvement of several assumptions, constraints, dependencies, and critical success factors, which ultimately defines the validity of a test result. For achieving the highest accuracy, there is a need for establishing a test environment that is as close as possible to the real-life conditions. Setting up such an environment demands extensive planning, proper execution, and management. Test Environment Management (TEM) strives to develop a stable and usable environment consisting of necessary hardware, software, databases, and networking components for execution of test scenarios and identification of bugs. TEM is a vertebral support for software testing cycles to run smoothly. However, the associated risks of low returns against high investments are hindering the widespread adoption of TEM practices. As per the EMA Test Environment Management Survey results, only 4% of large enterprises have fully integrated a TEM strategy into their application development process. With the changing scenarios and evolving test environments, a test environment management strategy has become an indispensable need for the organization’s today. Leveraging a test environment management approach in a software development process can be significant in improving productivity, reducing costs, and accelerating the releases. Let us talk

3. 5 Ways to Ensure Successful Test Environment Management about the five ways in which organizations can overcome the TEM implementation challenges and make sure that their test environment management strategy is a complete success. Knowledge management and demand awareness Before initiating the planning process, it is imperative to understand the requirements thoroughly. If the expectations are clear, the results delivered are as close to the best as possible. When the test environment management strategy is devised keeping the consumer needs in mind, the testers are able to obtain early and proactive provisioning from the test environments. Having said that, the testers who write down the test cases should create a knowledge base constructed on the demands and incorporate it within the test case. If a test environment creator moves on and there is a change in the resource base, such knowledge repository will help the successors to easily comprehend the why, what, and how of the path taken in the setting up process. Thus, if a particular test environment has to be updated or scraped, it will be easier to do with a base in hand. Planning and coordination The importance of efficient planning cannot be stressed enough for the success of a test environment management in

4. 5 Ways to Ensure Successful Test Environment Management software testing. Due to the lack of separate test assets for developing and testing teams, the test environment managers must plan, coordinate, and communicate the schedules for both the teams in advance to avoid conflicts and disagreements stemmed from shared usage. Event calendaring and runbooks should be leveraged to streamline testing activities and avoid unnecessary delays in product releases caused by improper planning. 3. Standardize and automate Defining the standards for a test environment based on the consumer needs provide a benchmark for analyzing validity of the tests performed. After setting these standards, iterative tasks and processes of build, deployment, and shakedown can be automated, thus, saving valuable time of manual resources. With a lean testing approach in a software development process, automation enables fulfilment of the CI/CD pipeline. By reducing dependency on the manual testers, automation in test environment management can be effectuated by TEM tools for CI/CD, workload automation, and configuration management. Read Full Blog at: https://www.cigniti.com/blog/test-environment-management-strategy/