Most companies spend between 20%–30% of their product development budget on testing and validation activities and can improve software engineering productivity by 20%–45% by adopting AI across the software development lifecycle.
This is because the art of “Test Environment Management” (or TEM) is still an area of significant confusion.
What is Test Environment Management? A Quick Definition
In the hope of educating and raising the bar on Test Environment Management, here’s a quick overview of “IT & Test Environment Best Practices” from Enov8.
Test Environment Management is the act of understanding your production environment and cross-life-cycle test environments. It includes establishing controls to ensure your teams use them effectively and rapidly, service, provision, and delete them on time.
Why Is the Test Environment Management Process Important?
In the ever-evolving IT/Software field, requirements continually change, creating a complex interplay between cost, quality, and time. Adequate budget and time can deliver high-quality products. However, projects often exceed these constraints, and quality suffers.
One reason for poor-quality products is the inadequate prioritization and inefficient management of test environments. Regulatory compliance, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, underscores the importance of ensuring software and services comply with industry norms and business requirements.
Therefore, effective test environment management processes are crucial to delivering high-quality products within budget and time constraints.
Test Environment Hot Spots
Test environment hot spots are critical areas that need special attention to keep the environment running smoothly. For example, hotspots include configuration problems, resource allocation, or dependencies.
One of the most common hotspots is the hardware and infrastructure of the environment. Therefore, make sure the hardware can handle the testing load and has the right configuration. For example, insufficient memory or storage can lead to performance issues, while inadequate network capacity can cause delays or interruptions in testing.
Another hotspot is the test data, which should be carefully managed to ensure it is accurate and relevant. Testing with incomplete or incorrect data can cause false positives and false negatives. As a result, costs and delays rise.
Integration points with other systems, such as third-party applications, databases, and APIs, are also potential hotspots. Thus, test and validate these integration points thoroughly. Also, confirm that system changes do not break the test environment.
Finally, the configuration and deployment of the application being tested are critical hotspots. Changes to the application code, software patches, and upgrades can impact the test environment and cause issues. Therefore, it is necessary to have a reliable and repeatable deployment process, and to test the application thoroughly before deploying it to the environment.
To manage these hotspots, assess the environment regularly and identify potential issues. Then apply best practices to address them. This approach ensures that the test environment is reliable, effective, and supports the testing process as a whole.
The Enov8 Test Environment Use Case
Key Test Environment Management Activities
Here is a list of the key TEM best practices you should consider implementing.
1. Knowledge Management / Modelling
Start with the process of modeling your Production Environment and Testing Environment. Include key configuration items like environment groups, systems, environment instances, components, microservices, relationships, and test data.
It’s essential if we are to understand our platforms and end-to-end architecture.
Visualization and awareness contribute to better decision-making, servicing, and troubleshooting of our testing environment and help us better understand and support our production environment.
2. Demand Management
Development and software testing teams need access to specific test environments throughout the software development process. To avoid conflict and optimize resources, you need a system that captures and manages demand for test environments.
This is where test environment booking management comes in.
Test environment booking management is a system that records the date, time, and duration of each team’s requested use of a test environment. You can use this information to schedule and allocate resources accordingly.
3. Streamline via Environment Automation
Invest in the orchestration (aka scripting) for key Test Environment tasks like Deployment Provisioning, Rollback, Decommissioning, and Test Bed Health checks.
Tip: If it takes more than an hour to prepare a test environment, there’s something wrong. Perhaps it is time to review your approach.
4. Testing Environments Planning & Coordination
The Test Environments Management process is responsible for managing and proactively scheduling test environment activities.
Use calendaring to coordinate operations across your test environments and ensure that you complete your testing environment preparation tasks in a timely and organized manner.
Tip: Attach the use of implementation plans (aka deployment plans) for more complex events. For example, create a ‘deployment implementation plan.’
5. Streamline via Standardised Operations
Use test environment run sheets and implementation plans to coordinate TEM operations and ensure test environment preparation tasks are completed in a timely and organized manner.
Timely environments contribute to more software development and software testing time.
Tip: Employ this approach across all your Testing Environment tiers, i.e., Infrastructure, Applications, and Test Data.
And across the lifecycle, i.e., the Software Development Environment, Test Environments like your Integration Testing Environment, Staging Environment, Performance Testing Environment, and of course, your Production Environments.
6. Optimize Through Insights
Drive continuous improvement through up-to-date insights on test environment behavior.
Use metrics, real-time data feeds, and dashboards to better understand your environment footprint, test environment usage, systems availability, and the various system teams’ service capability.
Watch Our TEM Video to Learn More
Conclusion
In conclusion, Test Environment Management (TEM) plays a crucial role in software development and testing. It is essential to manage and maintain the various testing environments to ensure the delivery of high-quality software.
TEM enables effective collaboration between developers, testers, and other stakeholders. In addition, it helps teams spot and mitigate risks early. With a comprehensive TEM strategy, organizations can improve software quality, reduce downtime, and ultimately deliver better products.
With the growing complexity of software development and testing, TEM has become increasingly important, and it is essential for organizations to invest in effective TEM practices to stay ahead of the competition.
Author
Jane Temov is an IT Environments Evangelist at Enov8, specializing in IT and Test Environment Management, Test Data Management, Data Security, Disaster Recovery, Release Management, Service Resilience, Configuration Management, DevOps, and Infrastructure/Cloud Migration. Jane is passionate about helping organizations optimize their IT environments for maximum efficiency.