Test Environment Management for Dummies

So you may have heard of it? And your probably know you should implement it. However what exactly is TEM (Test Environments Management) & what exactly should you be implementing? A short article that discusses the fundamentals of good Test Environment Management.

Test Environment Management in a Nutshell

In a nutshell, Test Environments Management is about ensuring the Environment Managers, Project Managers, Test Mangers, Developers, Engineers & System SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) collaborate to ultimately ensure Environment transparency, readiness and ultimately stability of your environments across the life-cycle.

Effective Test Environment is built on 9 Key Activities

As shown in the “Test Environment Management Use Case” below  

These are: #1 Know what your IT Environments look like.  As we see it, if you can’t understand, and ultimately model, your Production and Test environments, then your chances of managing them effectively are next to negligible. #2 Capture the demand and usage of your  Portfolios or Projects. Demand will initially come from the overarching Portfolios & Projects and early insight will ensure you can proactively plan &coordinate and provide “fit for purpose” test environments in a timely fashion. #3 Capture the demand and usage of your Dev & Test teams. Use the likes of Test Environment Bookings to capture IT team requirements and align them back to definable SDLC phases and operations like Development, SIT & User Acceptance Testing. #4 Ensure all your Test Environment operations are planned, centralized and communicated. Tip! The key people involved might include the system owner, the infrastructure, application and data engineers involve in provisioning and those involved in testing quality and health. #5 Ensure your customers (the purveyors of your IT environment) are continually supported. Ensure you establish some fundamental service management so incidents can be dealt with quickly and requests for change can be adequately controlled. #6 Standardize & Coordinate. Simplify your day to day environment events and release operations by using effective scheduling and standard operating procedure (run-books / playbooks). #7 Orchestrate your Environments.  Look to streamline the most common operations (e.g. system shakedown) by replacing manual methods with automation i.e. Code-ify. #8 Promote Enterprise Intelligence. Employ Enterprise Intelligence to capture important information and metrics. Analyse IT & Test environment data like activity, change, health, usage & availability. Produce real-time reports to share with the team and your stakeholders. #9 Continually Optimize. Look for opportunities to reduce costs (for example: by reducing your environment sizes), streamline delivery (for example: through improved deployment automation) and reduce IT environment disruption (for example: through predictive monitoring and self healing).

Benefits of an Effective Test Environment Management Use Case

• Operational Uplift across DevOps & Test
• Enhanced Quality Engineering
• IT and Test Environment Cost Optimization
• Reduced DevTest Disruption
• Reduced IT Infrastructure, License and Service Spend
• Accelerated Delivery (Time to Market)

Learn More – Discover how to measure your Test Environment Management maturity using the EMMi About enov8: enov8 is a specialist software engineering house that has established the world’s leading IT & Test Environment management platform. A solution that addresses all the requirements in the above use case and much more through a broad range of supporting functions including modules for Environments Management, Visual Configuration Management, Service Management, Enterprise Release Management, Release Management & Resilience.

Jane Temov Jane is an experienced IT Environments Management & Resilience Evangelist. Areas of specialism include IT & Test Environment Management, Disaster Recovery, Release Management, Service Resilience, Configuration Management, DevOps &Infra/Cloud Migration. 

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