When it comes to budget allocations in IT companies and enterprises, the responsibility of the test environment managers increases as they have to audit almost everything to ensure that the right budget allocation is done and the maximum resource utilization is done too. Test environment management personnel always find opportunities to reallocate budgets where there is a need. For example, when CTOs and CEOs find out that more budget allocation is done on expensive hardware, they ask the managers to scrutinize spend when resources are limited.
Earlier, when it comes to allocating resources for QA and testing, test environment managers would make spreadsheets and ask the environment engineers and development teams to fill up the details in the spreadsheet related to their resources in QA and testing departments. However, technology has revolutionized the entire scenario as there are adopted tools that can be used to automate the environment inventory creation. A test environment management tool can bring convenience, comfort, and reliability to the system and in addition to that, it is also fast, accurate, and saves time and effort.
However, a parallel discussion you must have heard in the environment teams about the requirements of QA environments per project. There are some projects which might have one QA environment and some might have four or five. This post will discuss in detail about QA test environments and what is the need for multiple QA environments for projects?
Types of test environments
There are many test environment types we can discuss in real-time, but in general, there are mainly three types of test environments organizations mostly use:
Development Environment
This environment is used by the developers and it involves developers’ machines too. Most of the time, developers use this environment for unit test their code before sending it to the next stage.
QA/Testing Environment
This environment is used by QA analysts, testers, and other test professionals for functional and non-functional testing such as end-to-end testing, load testing, integration testing, and other testing tasks.
Staging Environment
Considered as a close copy of the production environment which helps teams to verify that whether the application will function properly and accurately before its deployment or not.
Why do you need multiple QA environments?
Why do you need multiple QA environments?
For example, a development team has added a feature to a product and when it is done, a QA team will test and validate the feature. However, when the testing is going on, the development team wants to move on to the next stage, but it needs to wait until the QA guys are done testing the feature. However, if there are multiple QA environments in the facility, the development team won’t have to wait and they can easily move on to the next stage.
Long term projects require a dedicated testing environment
If you have a dedicated team working on a big project that requires months of development and design work, it is evident that the QA team would also be occupied for months to test all the features developed by the developers. In such a scenario, you will require an isolated QA testing environment that is dedicated to the project while other QA environments are used for other projects.
Systems that depend on services
When developers develop code that depends on backend services that are being modified by independent development teams, they might require multiple environments that must be configured to connect to the appropriate testing service. For end-to-end testing to be performed, several QA environments are needed.
How many QA environments per project?
Well, it will depend on the allocation of the test environments by the test environment management personnel. However, no rulebook defines the number of QA environments required for any project, but when you are working on projects that support critical, customer-facing applications need more test environments.
When it comes to managing multiple QA environments, you cannot do it without the test environment management tool. The tool is comprehensive and will help you to get all the details related to the strategic allocation of resources, project-wise allocations, challenges, and other crucial information related to environments.
