A common term used in the world of Software Development is the concept of Anti-Patterns.
An Anti-Pattern is basically a commonly occurring approach to a problem or task that generates decidedly negative consequences.
Examples of Anti-Patterns in software development might be:
(1) spaghetti code, i.e., code that becomes unmaintainable and difficult to extend
or
(2) duplicate code, i.e., code that someone cut and pasted and now must change in two places.
However, what people often forget is that probably over 80% of SDLC activity involves more than just coding and comprises a complex fabric of different teams, processes, infrastructure, data & tools.
All of which can have a hugely detrimental effect on quality, timeliness, and IT spend.
With the above in mind, enov8 decided to list eight of the top anti-patterns & patterns in the world of Test Environment Management. Anti-Patterns, which cause disruption, inhibit testing productivity & cause IT Project delays.
The Top 8 Anti-Patterns of Test Environments Management
1. Death by Spreadsheet
Anti-Pattern
The organisation is heavily reliant on spreadsheets to identify current systems under management, their components, versions, and the projects using them. However, these spreadsheets often get out of date, are non-integrated across teams & regularly become unusable.
Pattern
A centralised CMDB or Knowledge Portal that all teams can use for visualisation, modelling, and ongoing management of systems, components, relationships, versions, and of course relationships.
2. System Contention Hell
Anti-Pattern
Different teams “reactively” compete for the same system resources and components, causing test disruption & outages due to continual changes and reconfigurations. Collaboration across projects is typically low and often results in finger-pointing and arguments.
Pattern
Teams identify project requirements early in the lifecycle, and the organisation shares the correct system resources with the most compatible teams. In areas of high contention, the organisation has time to provision new environments and/or re-prioritise to meet the spike in demand.
3. Ninja Changes
Anti-Pattern
Meanwhile, developers deploy changes during operational hours, without prior notice, and reconfigure applications on the fly. Consequently, these changes blindside the test teams, who experience unusual disruption, and defects arise that are difficult to recreate or track.
Pattern
Teams coordinate all environment activity through group calendars that highlight scheduled events and statuses. Affected teams are notified of changes, via alerts or dashboarding, that may impact their project or team.
4. The Email Support Vortex
Anti-Pattern
Members across the project use email as a method to request test environment support and coordinate operational fulfilment.
As a result, high volumes of emails go across different teams and fail to convey ownership, accountability, or correct operational procedures. Thus, requests become overwhelming, uncoordinated, and support teams often ignore or orphan them.
Pattern
All environments, whether production or test, need a basic level of service management to prevent operational chaos.
Although not necessarily as “heavy” as production, the organisation needs “just enough” service management to capture, track and close all requirements.
5. Superhero Provisioning
Anti-Pattern
Deployment (data, application & infrastructure) operations are unrepeatable, manual, slow, and error-prone. They typically involve heroics from one or more subject matter experts and the use of “black magic”.
This chaotic approach consequently results in disruption to the end users, i.e., project and test teams.
Pattern
Organisations need to establish consistent tasks that everyone clearly documents and understands. Ideally, these operations should evolve to become fully automated, “Single command line” tasks that teams can expose through “self-service” forms.
6. Manual Health Checks
Anti-Pattern
For example, every morning, the test team will get in early to run various functional tests that ensure the application and the end-to-end business processes are working. They then email the results to the test teams. The process is typically time-consuming and the team can only do it once a day.
Pattern
Implementation of Test Synthetics that can automatically run at any time of the day (scheduled or in real time) to provide immediate insight into whether the end-to-end environments are healthy. Teams can then communicate results via real-time dashboards and automated alerts.
7. Stopping the Clock
Anti-Patterns
As a result, testing and projects often slip because the various engineering/provisioning teams are not available to service them.
For example, the infrastructure team is too busy to provide more virtual test environments, the deployment team is too busy to release the latest code version, and the data team doesn’t have time to provide more test data.
Pattern
Establishment of Self-Service orchestration gateways (portals where provisioning automation is exposed & shared) will ultimately mean much of the “busy” work previously done by the Infrastructure, Application, or Data team is work the testers or project team can complete themselves.
8. Creative Reporting
Anti-Pattern
The test environment & release management teams spend many days (potentially weeks) per month collating and analysing non-integrated environment & release information with the intent of creating reports. Typically resulting in reports which are invariably inaccurate & untimely.
Pattern
Establish automated environment information aggregation that brings together all your IT environment & release information and generates real-time reports and dashboards that support analytics and decision-making.
If you’d like to know how to avoid anti-patterns and address all the above and more, then please ask for a demonstration of enov8 Environment Manager.
A complete solution for your Test Environment Managers, including features for: Visual Configuration Management, Project Demand Management & Test Environment Bookings, Environment Calendaring, Service Management, Self Service, Test Synthetics, Environment Dashboarding and Automation Integration & Orchestration.
About Enov8: Enov8 is the world-leading provider of IT & Test Environment Management & Holistic Release Management solutions. Through using enov8’s extensible platform, Ecosystem, organisations can uplift their understanding and management of their computer systems and end-to-end IT fabric. With the intent of uplifting Environment & Release Operations, streamlining IT Projects, and reducing associated Infrastructure, License & Service costs.
Author: Niall Crawford