5 Ways to Ensure Successful Test Environment Management

 


Testing and quality assurance are the most important parts of today's technology-driven processes. Most IT organizations work hard to achieve the best IT testing facilities on their premises. Quality assurance practices help organizations to a great extent. A highly functional, glitch-free software application can build your reputation and win more clients. On the other hand, applications with flaws and poor functionalities might ruin your reputation.

This is the core reason why IT environment management is a must for any organization. As we all know- software testing is a tricky and challenging process as it is dependent on many factors including assumptions, constraints, dependencies, and critical success factors. All these factors ensure the success of any test result. You need to have the best and highly flexible and effective test environment that is near to real-life conditions. You need to plan, execute, and manage a test environment to get success.

In this article, we will discuss 5 ways to ensure successful test environment management. Stay tuned!

Knowledge management and demand awareness 


The first and foremost thing to do before you start the planning process is to understand the requirements perfectly. When you have clear expectations in the mind, you will be able to achieve results that are close to the best. When you create an IT environment management strategy based on the custom needs of the consumers, you will be able to deliver a product that serves the core purpose. Even testers would find it great to test the product when they understand the requirements thoroughly. Keeping a knowledge repository is a great thing to start. It will help the successors to comprehend things easily and they would be able to update the test environments easily and effortlessly.

Planning and coordination



Having a planned approach is very important when it comes to successful IT test management. There might not be enough resources for testers and developers and hence, the test environment manager must plan, coordinate, and communicate the schedules in advance for both teams. A manager is also responsible for leveraging calendars and runbooks to streamline testing activities amongst the teams and to avoid any conflicts and delays in a product release. A manager also needs to train testers about using test environment management tools to speed up the testing process.

Standardize and automate



Keep in the mind the needs of consumers and define standards based on them to analyze the validity of the tests performed. Once standards are defined perfectly, it is time to automate various processes of build, deployment and shakedown. It will save you valuable time and also mitigate manual errors. Test environment management tools can help you to automate CI/CD, workload automation, and configuration management.

Mask your test data


Cybercriminals are becoming smarter with each passing day and the number of security breaches is increasing too. You need to mask your data and refrain from using real user information. You can go for service virtualization, ETL automation and data fabrication to comply with the PII standards.

Infrastructure-as-code (IaC)



Infrastructure-as-Code has some superior benefits. It does not just aid unsupervised provisioning, the configuration of operations environment, it also allows organizations to automate configuration changes, version control, writing scripts, and network connectivity. 

Conclusion


If you want to ensure successful test environment management, you need to have the utmost transparency in the comprehensive testing processes. Understand the purposes, plan thoroughly and ensure proper allocation of resources and flawless communication among teams to achieve the best IT test environment management.






Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Best Practices for Test Management

6 Requirements to Achieve Test and Development Efficiency in the Cloud

3 Key Ways to Better Test Data Management - Enov8