5 Factors That Ensure Effective Test Environment Management
You just cannot deploy a software product or an application without testing them. In a real-like environment with a non-production set-up data set. Thankfully, technologies such as automation and artificial intelligence are helping enterprises. To improve customers’ user experience and impact in the consumer market. However, one thing that is yet to consider is the testing of the product in a focused environment. To ensure that the product has no bugs, errors, and functionality, or operational issues. That’s where test environment management comes into the picture.
When the test data is used, the test environment must be standard, dynamic, and responsive. To any needs arising from any departments. It might be the need for any resource or high-quality test data or seamless communication among various team members. Having a standard test environment is a must thing as testers find it very time-consuming and it will delay the whole process.
Effective test environment management will help test teams in many ways. First, they would be able to offer a high-quality product with a validated test management process and at the same time, they will also be able to optimize available resources.
In this post, we will discuss 6 factors that will ensure that you can manage test environments effectively and efficiently.
Focussed Sharing Mechanism
When there are multiple testing environments in place, it is important to have a focussed sharing mechanism so that testers can distribute high-quality data among different teams. Generic data might dilute testing efforts and hence, it is important to have focussed data that will narrow down the testing process.
You can achieve such a focussed sharing mechanism by developing a repository that connects to different sets of data. You can easily maintain the repository and replace old data sets with new ones. It will make testing easier, time-saving, and accurate. Testing teams will also find such an arrangement more convenient and comfortable. Using a test environment management tool can also help you to ensure a focussed sharing mechanism.
Clean-up and Maintain the Data
Another factor that you need to consider is to maintain your test environment and update it with new and freshly acquired data sets that can help testers to test the functionalities of the product with the new data sets. When the environment is used multiple times, it will have both, new and old data. Here, you need to clean up data that is old and of no use. Also, testing teams need to fix up any data set gaps if there are.
Check for Downtime
When it comes to test environment management, most of the companies have a global support team and when the site faces downtime at any local level for upgrades or other reasons, the teams need to ensure that all the active environments are updated by the latest standards with scheduled power or network downtimes. Testers would be able to access all test environments with ease and it will make processes smooth and seamless.
Streamline the Responsibilities
To manage test environments effectively, the test environment managers must define the roles and responsibilities of every member of the team. If any issues arise, it must be notified to the respective concerned person or the team that can fix the issue as soon as possible.
Such streamlining of responsibilities will ensure that every department works in a cohesive mode to help each other in times of crisis. Defined responsibilities will also save time and avoid chaos within the departments. Also, issues will be addressed quickly and expertly by experts who have the right skills to do the job.
Virtualization is a Good Resort
Availability of resources is an important thing in the testing scenario. There are many instances you will find where teams don’t have enough resources to carry out the tasks. Making environments virtual can help test and developers teams to collaborate on a project in a good way.
For example, once a test is done, the team can share the details and components with the team. It can help the teams to optimize processes base on the information they have receive. When resources are share effectively, it will also save you some money while strengthening the system.
Automation of Tests
When you have to perform some tests in similar environments with similar components, test automation can help where there are fix frameworks that can be use for tests. Also, it will bring stability to the test environment. It will also reduce the efforts of testers and bring good performance out of those tests.
In Conclusion
Test environment management, when done correctly, will bring some astonishing results for your organization. You will be able to cut down costs and be able to allocate resources perfectly without inviting more chaos and issues in the system. All you need to do is to manage test environments perfectly and control various factors to strengthen the software testing process.
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