4 Effective Practices For Test Environment Management

Since the dawn of technology-driven processes and increased demand for automation, IT landscapes have undergone a paradigm shift. Businesses want a shorter time to market, maintain quality while acquiring a lower cost for ownership. 

And that’s not the end. Now organizations need to keep up with the modern trends to stay afloat in the present competitive market. Social media marketing, big data solutions, and multi-channel solutions are the few trends to add to the list. 

The increased complexity of the current demands placed on solution delivery life cycles leads to release schedules slide or lengthen organically over time.

Why is Test Environment Management Important? 

Weak test environment management leads to an array of challenges for the organization- 

• System instability resulting in delivery disruption. 
• Slow, untimely, and manual IT environment service operations. 
• Environments unfit for purpose, i.e., not supporting DevTest. 
• Over-proliferation of footprint (infrastructure, license, and service). 

Wondering what the right way to maintain IT environments is? We’re here to help. In this write-up, we’ll discuss four effective practices for test environment management.

4 Effective Practices For Test Environment Management 

Implement Early Testing To Minimise Error Logs 

Implement early testing before lines of code pile up. With shorter codes, it’s easier and faster to carry out the testing process. Rigorous testing at the early stages is the only solution to avoid complexity during deployment and stretch the timelines for launching the software. 

It doesn’t just reduce your time to market. Testing at early stages with small codebases helps to minimize the total infrastructure cost. With an IT management tool, top-notch IT teams run thousands of tests to ensure error-free code and seamless functioning of the software.

Recycle Resources and IT Environments 

Environmentalists have been preaching the benefits of recycling to save mother nature. Well, recycling is not just good for our environment but for your money, effort, and time for managing test environments. 

If you’re utilizing on-premises IT infrastructure to run tests, ensure investing some effort to maintain it well. With recycled testbeds and proper test environment management, every tester doesn’t need to have their own unique test resources for experimenting. 

There’re 3 TEM techniques that you can utilize- 

• Developing a new test environment – most time-consuming approach requiring excessive resources 
• Copying an already existing test environment – Requires less effort for configuration. 
• Re-using an existing test environment – the least labor-intensive approach since it utilizes existing application code baselines, integration, layout, and test data. 

Recycling the resources is the optimal technique since it saves effort, time, miny and cost. 

Also Read: Why Should You Implement Test Data Management? 

To Test Your Software Follow a Software Development Life-Cycle 

Like the software development process, following a methodology such as the SDLC model reduces infrastructure cost and boosts productivity during the testing phase. 

Testing is already a critical phase in the system development life cycle. Using SDLC methodology makes your team eager to perform tests in iteration until bugs are eliminated from your apps.

Incorporate Testing In The Production Environment 

A more effective method of test environment management involves implementing tests in the production environment itself. This eliminates the piling up of the detached test data. 

With proper test environment management solutions, organizations can speed up their software release schedules, reduce infrastructure costs and enhance team productivity.