Ways To Tidy Up Polluted Test Environments In 7 Steps

One of the biggest factors that contributes to the setback and the disorganization of test environment management is the Pollution of test environment. Test environment pollution is a scale of the ability, relevance and the contemporariness of your test environment over a number of projects. 

There have been instances where a test environment was initiated in a well-organized manner. But with the arrival and departure of different teams of individuals and the dynamic nature of projects, these systems get matured and change their course. Because of this, the whole system of interdependencies becomes a huge mess. So how to clean this mess? How to tidy up your polluted Test Environment? Let us check out some way to make your Polluted test environment neat.

Prepare a Catalogue:

The primary step for the tidying up of test environment is to comprehend the cause of your problem, and its reach. Keep a check on the number of test environments that are there in your organization. Check if they are updated regularly or not. Most importantly, understand the process by which requests for test environments are tracked. Keep a record of all The Test environment by making a proper catalogue. 

Distribute The Work:

Linear Responsibility Chart (LRC) is a must. Have a record of the accountable individual for each environment. Thus, you will be able to communicate with the concerned person who has to be updated about the changes. If your organization is large, you may have a comparatively large number of clients. Treating all the clients as unique is not a scalable or feasible approach. So make a group of similar clients in their functional order.  There maybe clients who have the same kind of function, assign all of them to one group. Give the responsibility to an individual for the same.

Elucidate The Test Environment Management Work:

There is a sound possibility that the test environment manager’s job will be misunderstood. As a Test Environment manager, you may feel like you have a number of different bosses, all of them having a different perspective about your work. Clear this clutter and define your work. There is no room for confusion.

Separate Different Domains:

The most Common cause of Test environment pollution is fused Test environments. For instance, your Database environment starts interacting with your production services, or QA. This kind of amalgamation may occur due to lack of resources. Refrain from this practice. Ask all the responsible individuals from all domains to keep their environments separate from each other. You can start the clean up without worrying about the impact.

A Central Policy For All Application Owners:

The most difficult thing for a Test environment manager is to handle request for environments. These requests keep coming in constantly, and it is not practical to say yes to them all. Have a definitive way of responding to these requests. Form a policy that defines the capabilities of the environment that you provide. Avoid a mess created by unreasonable requests. A central policy will also help you in controlling your expenditure on hardware.

Utilize The Testing Data:

If you lack an efficient approach to test data and data masking, things can get quite difficult for you. Test environment management will be made easy if you have an approach that is automated and creates test data. However, do not make the database administration a part of the test environment management.

Conduct Review Sessions And Mark Your Strengths:

An attack can sometimes prove to be a good defense in terms of test environments. Conduct weekly, monthly and quarterly review sessions of the problems that you faced. Have regular meetings and assess the work. Keep a check on your current policies, communicate with the customers and update them. 

At the end, when you have swept the pollution off of the Test environment, mark your victory. Calculate the amount of money you saved, check the productivity that you were able to increase, check the output increase. Make sure that these figures are visible to the top level management. It will be helpful in the long run.

So follow the above 7 golden steps and tidy up your polluted Test Environments.