Mistakes Made by Companies While Managing Their IT Test Environment

To set up a well-designed test environment, it is imperative to have a comprehensive and effective IT test environment management strategy in place. There is no other option left as, without one, you may end up in absolute chaos during the testing phase of a software development life cycle. This will ultimately have a significant impact on the effectiveness and suitability of the test results. 

Since the testing approach differs with each code requisite, a standard test environment does not hold true. It is, therefore, imperative that the test environment management is done in such a way that it can easily be customised on the basis of a specific code under scrutiny. 

It would help if you also kept this in mind that designing, configuring and setting up a test environment is not an easy feat to achieve as there are lots of variables involved. This makes it essential to have a robust test environment management strategy on top of a skilled test environment manager to execute it. 

Let’s now look at some of the mistakes made by companies while managing their test environment.

Designing a Test Environment with Vague Imperatives

It is criminal to start designing a test environment without even understanding the requisites. This can result in a serious gap between what was required and what is ultimately delivered. In case the test environment manager does not have clarity about what they are expected to build and deploy, they might end up developing a sweet dish for someone who wanted to eat a spicy sandwich (pun intended!). How ironic is that?

When you design a test environment with misaligned requirements, it can have different sets of hardware, software, and servers than the important ones required to perform the test in the very first place. This misalignment will fail not only the test but also an increase in the testing budgets and a costly setback to the delivery schedule. 

Testing an Environment That Differs a Lot from the Production Environment

Everyone knows that there are different types of test environments used for various levels of testing. This includes:

• Development environment
• Testing/QA environment
• Staging environment
• Production environment

The development environment is executed by the developers themselves to perform unit testing on the codes they write before passing them to the next level. In the testing/QA environment, regression testing is performed to make sure that the new feature addition does not have any effect on the existing ones. This environment is also used to perform other functional and non-functional testing as per the requirement.

The staging environment is the mirror reflection of the production environment. It is as close to the live environment as possible. With its help, testers can easily decipher an application’s actual behaviour after deployment. This is the environment where it is possible to detect maximum defects and prevent defect leakage in the production.

When a software application is tested in an environment that differs a lot from the production environment, it is possible to get a substantial discrepancy in the way application performs during the testing and the way it performs after deployment.

So, these are some of the mistakes made by companies while managing their IT test environment.