How to Achieve Efficient and Consistent IT Test Environments?

A comprehensive software release cannot complete without testing to ensure quality. No matter how big the QA team you have with skilled and dedicated professionals, software testing highly depends on the quality of the IT environments that are used. This is the reason why IT environment management is one of the critical functions to assure the quality of product releases. 

When you are having issues with the releases and changes, you need to take some actions to ensure that your business reputation does not harm. Issues with your product environment, major incidents causing release issues, defects identified late on in the delivery cycle are some of the failures that must be addressed to release a better and flawless version of the product. Such issues also invite monetary losses, not to forget your reputation. 

Challenges with IT environments

Environmental issues are annoying as they waste the time of the testers who are hired for other decisive tasks. For example, when there are bad and unstable IT environments, testers would be occupied with troubleshooting or fixing issues with the environments. If you are looking for a flawless and highly-functional software testing process, you need to address the issues of the IT environments by managing them accurately. 

In most of the organizations, test environments are managed by human resources from development and production support teams. However, when the dedicated roles are not defined clearly, there will be a lack of accountability and ownership, which will result in chaos as there is no definite strategy to configure, manage and maintain IT testing environments. If such issues are common in your organization, you need a predefined, proactive and highly efficient IT environment management strategy. 

How to achieve a reliable and consistent IT test environment?

When you have identified the necessity to develop test environments that are reliable, consistent and which have all the interfaces and components to build and run the applications. You can achieve such end-to-end testing environments in many ways:

Ensure that all active environments are using the same system and software components to achieve consistency with the production environment. This is the first and foremost rule. 

Measure, identify and communicate all the variations which are affecting the consistency across all environments. The version control of components such as servers, workstations and configurations must be maintained. 

After every deployment and release, go for technical testing of all applications for better environment stability and all the changes and updates must be documented perfectly. 

There are some most exceptional and highly efficient IT environment management tools/9 available in the market which can make things easy for developers and testers while maintaining consistency across all the environments. 

Develop automated deployment activities by the elimination of any manual activities to reduce errors and mitigate risks. 

A dedicated team of IT test environment management is the need of the hour. Either hire an in-house team or you can outsource the job to a proficient firm. It will unquestionably ensure that all the test environments are running faultlessly and the team will be responsible for providing a validated, stable and usable IT test environment for the better testing and releases. 

Conclusion:

The importance of the consistent IT test environments in the organization must be taken into account and proper proactive steps must be taken to achieve reliable, secure and consistent testing environments. IT environment management is very crucial for smooth and error-free releases. Take all the steps necessary to achieve this goal and enjoy strong business relationships with your clients.