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March, 2017

by Niall Crawford

Test Environment Management Use Case

We often get asked by people “What is TEM (Test Environment Management), well for those of you looking for a quick overview of Test Environment Management, here is Use Case we developed as way of explanation.

In a nutshell, Test Environment Management “Use Case” it 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.

And this “Use Case” can all be described in 9 simple steps:

Step#1 Know what your IT Environments look like. As we see it, if you can’t understand (and model) your Production or Test environments your chances of managing them effectively are next to negligible.

Step#2 Understand & Capture the demand and usage of your Test Environments. Demand will initially come from the overarching Portfolios & Projects and early insight will ensure you can proactively plan, coordinate and provide fit for purpose environments in a timely fashion.

Step#3 Understand & Capture the demand and usage of your Development & Test teams (via Test Environment Bookings). And align these requirements back to definable SDLC phases and operations like SIT & User Acceptance Testing.

Step#4 Ensure all your Test Environment activity & operations are planned, centralized and communicated. 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.

Step#5 Ensure your customers (the purveyors of your environment) are continually supported. Ensure you establish some fundamental service management so incidents can be dealt with quickly and requests for change & release can be adequately controlled.

Step#6 Coordinate your day to day environment events and release operations using effective scheduling and standard operating procedure (run-books).

Step#7 Look to streamline the most common operations (e.g. system shakedown) by replacing manual methods with automated tools & methods.

Step#8 Analyse Environment Activity, Health, Usage & Availability & produce reports to share with the team and your stakeholders.

Step #9 Continually learn & evolve by using the centralized information at your disposal, look for opportunities to reduce your test environment footprints, streamline your release operations, streamline your DevOps activities and establish methods to reduce IT environment disruption.

Ultimately with the intention of:

• Operational Uplift across DevOps & Test
• IT Cost Optimization
• Reduced DevTest Disruption
• Reduced IT Environment Spend &
• Accelerated Delivery (Time to Market)

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.

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