The Importance of Metrics in Test Environment Management

Enov8
2 min readFeb 19, 2018

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Data testing and quality assurance are two major component of test environment management. To get their accurate result, accurate metrics and incentives are essential with accurate IT environment management tool. The release plans shouldn’t reward quality engineers and assurance team for rushing the system through QA process.

There are many kinds of Test Environment for a critical system, some of them are permanent while others need to be worked on:

Quality Assurance Environments

QA is a systematic process of checking the system constantly. It is where your test gets upgrade procedure against software and hardware that closely simulate the production environment. QA testers and engineers constantly test code as it is developed. It is a process of preventing the defects or mistakes of any manufactured software before they are delivered to the client. Many companies have a separate department for QA.

Performance Testing Environments

It defines the quality attributes of the system, such as reliability, resource usage, and scalability. It is the best way to isolate your performance testing from other quality assurance testing functions, as performance tests often make the system unusable any other thing than capacity planning and load testing.

Development Environments

For developers, this test environment is preferable to quality. It’s a syntax of processes and programming tools which are used to create the program or software product. Every group of developers expects to have a system up and running all the time, built in response to activity in an SCM system. This system is usually used by a developer to run continual tests to ensure code quality.

Production Standby Environments

It is just as a backup system if you want to push an immediate patch to production then you need to have a system that matches currently available production. These are called emergency systems that are used rarely, but when used it is the most important environment for the organization. It is common for the companies that take calculated risks and repurpose these environments for testing and QA during a major release.

Staging and Integration Environment

Staging exactly resembles the production environment, while development and integration can possibly be the same in the case where developers do not use a local copy of the source code. Development groups may have separate QA and Dev servers, but when it comes time to integrate these systems into the whole you need to separate staging and integration environments, this can change infrequently in response to large release events requiring wide scale collaboration.

Large organizations might have several application and IT environment management tool which might use 30 or 40 environments, and if the application is complex then each environment involves databases, services, caches and other systems. A procreation of environments is often the driving factor behind IT budgets, as hardware and systems can be added quickly.

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Enov8

Enov8 are an organisation focused on helping companies better manage their IT & Business Operations. http://www.enov8.com/