5 Worst Ways of Managing Your Test Environment

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5 Worst Ways of Managing
Your Test Environment
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5 Worst Ways of Managing Your Test Environment
The numerous components and the complexity of
required configuration to set up a well-designed
test environment need a thorough and effective
test environment management strategy in place.
Not having one can lead to absolute chaos during
the testing phase of a software development
lifecycle, thus, affecting the efficiency and
viability of the test results. As testing
approach varies with each code requirement, a
standard test environment does not hold ground
strongly. It is critical that a test environment
is customized based on the requirements of the
particular code under analysis. Designing,
configuring, and setting up a test environment is
a tricky game, more so due to the number of
variables involved. This calls for employment of
a robust test environment management strategy and
a skilled test environment manager to implement
it. Test Environment Management (TEM) is
considered among the top 7 challenges in
application development and deployment. While
test environment is a platform setup comprising
of the needed software and hardware, configured
as per the desired specifications for a
particular test, test environment management
involves overseeing this arrangement to ensure
that a test is run smoothly. Typically, a test
environment may involve a software that needs to
be tested, an operating system to run the test, a
testing server and database, configured test
data, configured network connectivity, hardware
devices, test framework tools and automation
tools, third party software, interfaces between
systems and applications, simulators, necessary
documents such as user manuals and licenses, etc.
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5 Worst Ways of Managing Your Test Environment
A test environment facilitates end-to-end
visibility into a testing cycle, while aligning
all the involved components into order to yield
the desired test output. To orchestrate the level
of seamlessness vital for a robust test
environment, Test Environment Management is
critical. Setting up a test environment is an
expensive affair. However, an efficacious TEM
strategy can significantly bring down the testing
costs, while delivering higher ROI. Although,
the road to successful test environment
management is not free from obstacles, the
destination is certainly worth those roadblocks.
Let us try to understand the worst practices for
test environment management that one must
avoid Designing a Test Environment with
Ambiguous Requirements Designing a test
environment without first understanding the
requirements will lead to a serious gap between
what was needed and what is delivered. If the
test environment manager does not have clarity on
what they are expected to build and deploy, they
might end up serving oranges to someone who
wanted avocados. A test environment misaligned
with the requirements may have a different set of
configurations, hardware, software, and servers
than what was necessary to perform a given test.
This misalignment will not only cause the test to
fail but will also result in further increase in
the testing budgets as well as expensive delay in
the delivery schedule.
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5 Worst Ways of Managing Your Test Environment

Testing in an Environment that Varies a lot from
Production Environment The different types of
test environment, used for various levels of
testing, are development environment,
testing/QA environment, staging environment, and
production environment. Development environment
is essentially used by the developers themselves
to perform unit testing on the codes they write
before passing them on to the next stage.
Testing/QA environment is where regression
testing is conducted to ensure that the new
feature addition does not affect the existing
ones. This environment is also used to perform
other functional and non-functional testing, as
required. Read Full Blog at https//www.cigniti
.com/blog/test-environment-management-best-practic
es/
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