2018 World Quality Report: Test Environment Challenges Recap

The world quality report of 2018 has once again identified Test Environment Management as a major challenge for Agile Development & Testing.  

WQR Recap

2018’s world quality report has once again identified Test Environment Management as a major challenge for Agile Development & Testing. Key statistical insights from this report, which covered over 1600 organizations, included the following:

1. 38% of respondents identified “defects due to test environments being incorrectly configured”
2. 40% of respondents identified “difficulty in managing multiple versions of test environments”
3. 41% of respondents identified “lack of facilities for managing & booking test environments”
4. 46% of respondents identified “non-fit-for-purpose test environments (& data)” as the biggest challenge facing Agile Development
5. 47% of respondents identified “poor visibility of test environment availability”
6. 48% of respondents identified “an inability to effectively manage excess Test Environments demand”

Our Opinion

This set of results, like previous years, suggests organizations are still heavily constrained by using “agricultural” (or at very least non-integratable) Environment Management methods & tools.

The methods and tools can’t easily scale to the agile needs of today’s digitally dependent enterprises and are most likely repeating many of the other classical environment mistakes (Ref: Test Environment Management anti-patterns), for example:

• Death by spreadsheet or email
• Deployment “Heroics”,
• Uncontrolled IT change,
• Manual unrepeatable operations &
• Generally, just a lack of insight.

The Answer to Test Environment Issues

At enov8, we believe all the challenges identified in this year’s World Quality Report can be directly addressed by adopting an “Enterprise IT Intelligence” platform like enov8 EcoSystem. 

An extensible “IT Transparency & Governance” solution that includes powerful features to better command and control your Environment and Release Operations. A framework that supports your ability to:

1. Model & Visualise your IT & Test Environments & IT Releases
2. Standardise & Automate Applications, Data & Server Operations
3. Streamline Project delivery through system disruption avoidance
4. Better control IT costs through better control of infrastructure, licensing & services
5. Bring all the information together (enterprise IT intelligence) for effective analysis and decision-making.

Innovate with Enov8

If you are interested in learning more about IT & Test Environment Management and IT Release Management, contact us about EcoSystem. 

Enov8 EcoSystem is the world’s leading IT Enterprise Intelligence platform. Ecosystem is a fully configurable and easily integratable solution that comes with out-of-the-box “enterprise management” functions that support IT & Test Environment Management, Release Management, IT Operations Management, Configuration Management & Service Management.

Niall Crawford 

Niall is the Co-Founder and CIO of Enov8. He has 25 years of experience working across the IT industry in Software Engineering, Architecture, IT & Test Environment Management, and Executive Leadership. Niall has worked with and advised many global organizations covering verticals like Banking, Defense, Telecom, and Information Technology Services.