A Comprehensive Hiring Guide For Test Environment Managers

 

In the past decades, software projects were incredibly large and advanced very slowly. Developers didn’t face the demands to create microservice architectures within weeks by utilising modern IT tools and Agile methodology. Project timelines were estimated in months or years. 

There weren’t any urgent requirements in the organisations to manage IT environments since there were only two – the QA and the Production environments. 

In certain cases, big corporations with significant resources utilised a staging environment. The era of the slow-progressing software development process has now become extinct. 

There’s an exponential expansion in the volume of projects and dependencies. Now every project has unique criteria for QA, testing, and production environments. 

With accelerated software development processes, demand for faster testing environments has also increased. With this new transition, the IT industry has introduced a new designation – Test Environment Manager.

A Moderator For The Test Environments 

A test environment manager acts as a “moderator” for IT environments and databases, which are needed for testing and making the software eligible for release to production. 

This job fundamentally emphasises tracking and scheduling. However, it also encompasses integrating various conflicting inputs to support testing across multiple interconnected systems. 

An IT environment manager must balance budgets with timelines. This enables adequate resource allocation to the developers and ensures software functions as planned in production. 

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Job Description: IT Test Environment Manager 

A qualified IT environment manager needs to coordinate test environments for various application development groups. 

• A hybrid model of cloud-based infrastructure and bare-metal technologies are utilised for configuring IT test environments for isolated subsystems as well as end-to-end environments. 
• This task is performed by the release automation and configuration management team. 
• IT Test environment managers will coordinate with project managers, senior technical engineering managers and operations professionals to categorise and prioritise projects for testing on a limited volume of testing environments.

Candidates must possess the ability to comprehend modern methodologies for integrating automation on both cloud-based and bare-metal infrastructures.

• IT Environment manager should function collaboratively with release managers and engineers for tracking the limited testing resource availability. 
• Technical tasks such as database management and deployment will result from close collaboration with the DevOps and DataOps teams. However, the candidate must have a fundamental knowledge of the work effort involved in the operating systems, databases networks, and application servers configuration for creating end-to-end testing environments. 
• Candidates are expected to facilitate the coordination of configuration efforts and track the status of environment configuration tasks.

Candidates need to have excellent experience in organising and tracking various project progress throughout the software development lifecycle.

Since this job requires interaction with project, portfolio and engineering managers, the right IT environment manager candidates should have experience communicating on project timelines, environment budgets, contingency plans, and resource allocation. 

• The ability to efficiently utilise the tools for project planning and forecasting is a must. 
• You need to look for a candidate who has a sound understanding of the technical work and readily delegates this task to the relevant release engineering teams. 
• The candidate shouldn’t be eager to work on test environments themselves, but they should clearly know how long it should take to configure the IT environment. 

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Also Read: Why You Should Implement DevSecOps Approach?

Roles And Responsibilities Of IT Test Environment Manager 

• Introduce approaches for tracking test environments required in the QA stage. 
• Develop short-term plans to deliver IT environments for supporting sprint-based development Coordinate with release engineers team to automate the setup and configuration of test environments Provide consistent support for test environments 
• Monitor and assure uptime of test environments 
• Communicate about test environment availability with project managers and QA teams. 
• Draft KPIs for tracking the performance of test environment delivery efforts 
• Conflict resolution between various teams competing for limited testing resources 
• Provide cost and resource estimates for deploying new projects to test environments 
• Design methodologies to support consistent delivery and adapt the IT environment to self-service automation.

Skills That An IT Test Manager Must Have

The skills required for an ideal IT test environment manager may vary from one organisation to another. However, here are some basic skillsets a perfect IT environment manager should have:

• Good communication skills to connect with stakeholders: engineering teams, project management, and QA. 
• Concentrate on scheduling accuracy with the ability to keep a constantly shifting test environment calendar up to date. 
• Ability to get an estimate of the work effort needed to make test environments ready 
• Emphasise organisational communication over technology – understanding technology is essential, but communication is a crucial skill.

Final Words

 

Technical familiarity is a fundamental requirement. However, refrain from hiring a completely technical resource for this position, such as a release engineer. 

Since an IT environment manager needs to work towards delegation and communication than on technical functions like environment configuration. 

If you select a candidate with inadequate technical understanding, they won’t be capable to figure out when teams are giving them unrealistic estimates. 

Select someone with more knowledge of technical elements than your project manager and much less than your release engineers.