Advent of Test Environment Management and Its Benefit

Today, the technology landscape is taking a paradigm shift. Organizations want to deliver high-performing and glitch-free applications along with less time to market. They are placing their fundamental aims high and implementing ways to keep up the pace for achieving the same. 

Before the efficient Test Environment Management tools came into the picture, critical tasks assignment generally lead to increased cycle time and hefty development costs. The increased complexity and the requirement of integration through various stages of development have made it imperative for organizations to adopt with right and efficient Test Environment Management. 

It facilitates end-to-end testing of applications on various user channels and also gives complete control over the development practices. By implementing dedicated TEM, IT organizations have the advantage of reduced cost, faster time to market, and high-quality products. It is surprising to know that TEM speeds up the process and time to market by almost 25% and also reduces infrastructure costs by 5 to 10 %. You can expect team productivity to rise by 30%. 

Aren’t the figures enough for you to consider TEM in your organization today itself? There are certain fundamental requirements for implementing the test environment functionality.

Here is the list of tools and procedures requirement

• Generation and management of automated bills;
• Configured test machines;
• Creation and cloning of production data;
• Control over test data management and its version;
• Functional and non-functional test tools

An organization needs a powerful team to manage the test environments so that there is no underutilization of the process, and the inefficiencies of the product are eradicated. You will be amazed to know that a recent survey of the organizations reveals, they experienced 40% less efficiency because of the inadequate capacity of the testing team to manage the environments. This, as a result, increased the release time, and the organizations also had to bear the defect rate and additional development costs. 

The involvement of multiple assumptions and time constraints lead to many TEM challenges that are listed below. Keep reading:

• TEM requires the standardization of test environments that meet the need for ongoing as well as future projects;
• TEM demands precise software capacity and effective forecasting of the new projects;
• It also needs provisioning, and configuration with heterogeneous assets;
• TEM requires responsive and effective support for handling unexpected incidents and issues;
• Organizations struggle to develop the business case of TEM;
• It is a major challenge for the organizations to meet the lengthy test environment delivery timeframes;
• The size and complexity of end-to-end test environments are challenging to maintain;
• The environment should be able to function in continuity.

TEM is better implemented if there is a dedicated team in the organization for test environment setup, forecasting, allocation, and automation handling. There should be allocated persons to continuously monitor the improvement and jot down the progress and the requirements for improving the process. 

The proliferation of test environment management into the organizations have raised the bars of the products and its delivery. It is able to improve the software quality and lessen down the product time to market.

TEM benefits are:

• There remains only a single point of contact which further simplifies the resource testing and the efforts put behind it;
• It facilitates better selection and utilization of test assets and also reduces the overall testing cost;
• Organizations get the consistent process for allocation, setup, and delivery of the test products;
• TEM automation also reduces the testing time;
• A dedicated and experienced team can optimize the test cases and their requirements;
• Organizations have the privilege to choose the best test strategies and the tools that can improve the test coverage thereby raising the product quality;
• A lot of testing tasks are simplified, and the burden on the testing teams is highly reduced. The automation facilitates acquiring, analyzing, processing and deploying of the production level data;
• The overhead cost is setting up the test environment and supporting it is quite less and affordable;
• TEM facilitates better coordination and control over the lifecycle and any changes involved in it;
• Organizations have the benefit of getting defined and measurable outcomes;
• You can evaluate the testing tools, frameworks, and cloud-based testing services.

The basic TEM tool requirements for an organization are also shared in the next segment of this content. 

• An organization needs a Configuration Management Database for inventory management of the test environments and the creation of subsets created explicitly for individual projects.
• To manage the test tools, assets, and the set of production test data, organizations need Version Control Software.
• You will need a Resource Management System to ease out the team reservation of assets and capabilities.
• To keep track of the issues and unexpected defects in the product, organizations need to have an Incident Management System.
• You need to train the employees and the team involved in IT Test Environment Management to have a more efficient and self-sustaining environment.

Along with the impeccable TEM advantages, there are certain limitations faced by the organization. 

These limitations are:

• It is an extremely challenging task to find a standard TEM implementation for an organization that has diverse project requirements in terms of the hardware, OSs platforms and connectivity options. For such situations, it is then necessary to segregate the test environment departmentally for targeting specific classes of applications, and platforms. By departmentalization, you reduce the complexity and make the best use of the test TEM.

• For an organization not having a trained and dedicated team for TEM, the unexpected and odd software requirements are failed to achieve and align with the TEM capabilities. This can give rise to undesirable costs rise and results. It would be best if you involve an efficient team to avoid any impact of TEM on the product quality.

In order to cope up with the increasing demand and reduce the complexities involved in the development process, it has become imperative for organizations to have a well-planned TEM implementation. Which organization will like to compromise over the inherent benefits, faster development cycles, high-quality products, and reduced costs?