5 Ways to Ensure Successful Test Environment Management

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5 Ways to Ensure Successful Test
Environment Management
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5 Ways to Ensure Successful Test Environment
Management
The sprawling dominance of technology-driven
processes in organizations today has impeccable
testing and quality assurance to thank for.
Quality assurance practices are necessary to
employ and deploy a high-performing, glitch-free
application, which can effectively result in an
optimized course of action for overall
improvement in the end results. Organizations
are adopting the shift-left approach and
continuous testing strategy to enhance an
applications quality and reduce the possibility
of failure after deployment. Software testing is
a tricky process due to the involvement of
several assumptions, constraints, dependencies,
and critical success factors, which ultimately
defines the validity of a test result. For
achieving the highest accuracy, there is a need
for establishing a test environment that is as
close as possible to the real-life conditions.
Setting up such an environment demands extensive
planning, proper execution, and management. Test
Environment Management (TEM) strives to develop a
stable and usable environment consisting of
necessary hardware, software, databases, and
networking components for execution of test
scenarios and identification of bugs. TEM is a
vertebral support for software testing cycles to
run smoothly. However, the associated risks of
low returns against high investments are
hindering the widespread adoption of TEM
practices. As per the EMA Test Environment
Management Survey results, only 4 of large
enterprises have fully integrated a TEM strategy
into their application development process. With
the changing scenarios and evolving test
environments, a test environment management
strategy has become an indispensable need for the
organizations today. Leveraging a test
environment management approach in a software
development process can be significant in
improving productivity, reducing costs, and
accelerating the releases. Let us talk
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5 Ways to Ensure Successful Test Environment
Management

• about the five ways in which organizations can
  overcome the TEM implementation challenges and
  make sure that their test environment management
  strategy is a complete success.
• Knowledge management and demand awareness
• Before initiating the planning process, it is
  imperative to understand the requirements
  thoroughly. If the expectations are clear, the
  results delivered are as close to the best as
  possible. When the test environment management
  strategy is devised keeping the consumer needs in
  mind, the testers are able to obtain early and
  proactive provisioning from the test
  environments.
• Having said that, the testers who write down the
  test cases should create a knowledge base
  constructed on the demands and incorporate it
  within the test case. If a test environment
  creator moves on and there is a change in the
  resource base, such knowledge repository will
  help the successors to easily comprehend the why,
  what, and how of the path taken in the setting up
  process. Thus, if a particular test environment
  has to be updated or scraped, it will be easier
  to do with a base in hand.
• Planning and coordination
• The importance of efficient planning cannot be
  stressed enough for the success of a test
  environment management in

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5 Ways to Ensure Successful Test Environment
Management

software testing. Due to the lack of separate
test assets for developing and testing teams, the
test environment managers must plan, coordinate,
and communicate the schedules for both the teams
in advance to avoid conflicts and disagreements
stemmed from shared usage. Event calendaring and
runbooks should be leveraged to streamline
testing activities and avoid unnecessary delays
in product releases caused by improper
planning. 3. Standardize and automate Defining
the standards for a test environment based on the
consumer needs provide a benchmark for analyzing
validity of the tests performed. After setting
these standards, iterative tasks and processes of
build, deployment, and shakedown can be
automated, thus, saving valuable time of manual
resources. With a lean testing approach in a
software development process, automation enables
fulfilment of the CI/CD pipeline. By reducing
dependency on the manual testers, automation in
test environment management can be effectuated by
TEM tools for CI/CD, workload automation, and
configuration management. Read Full Blog at
https//www.cigniti.com/blog/test-environment-man
agement-strategy/
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