Automation and AI are quickly becoming popular and taking part in our day-to-day lives and the corporate space. The professionals are busy studying their impact on the consumer market to improve the user experience of the people. Organizations also use automation and Artificial Intelligence for the test environment.
Automation and AI have taken the world by storm; you can see the application of these technologies almost everywhere. The corporate world is looking for ways for the best use of these technologies for them.
The test environment is related to controlling, managing, and handling the whole environment of testing the data. It may consider a variety of components, including hardware, software, databases, middleware, applications, and test data controlled by tools. It also efficiently manages procedures and resources.
As the number of tools increases, it is becoming difficult to manage the test environments. Businesses need to address unreliable test environments that can cost higher operational expenses.
Test data management has been helping organizations to develop non-production set-up data sets that imitate an environment where one can test an application or system by performing valid tests.
If we talk about Test environment management, it can help organizations speed the process of their software releases. Test data management gives access to sensitive data and enables policy-driven data masking. Organizations can implement it on the floor, cloud, and hybrid set-up. However, it makes managing and maintaining the test data important.
Why is the management of test data important?
Managing test data is important because it helps in improving the quality of testing efforts in the 3 stages, which are as follows:
- Functional testing: During functional testing, when you try to extract the subset of production data for data-driven testing, it helps make processes more efficient. It also aids testers in saving time on operational activities.
- Performance testing: At performance testing, automated test data management helps in faster testing with easy data availability. Stability, load, and a chain of continuous tests are required for performance testing and must provide test data regularly.
- Service virtualization: At the time of the service virtualization, many components require near-to-real test data to simulate the live environment’s behavior.
The organizations must also focus on managing and standardizing the testing environment because testers may take a lot of time to standardize the testing environment, which may delay the entire process.
The environment must be completely dynamic to respond to any unexpected demands. It will help teams deliver quality products with a validated test management process. Enroll to Simplilearn’s Software Automation Testing Course to become one
Also Read: DevOps Services And Solutions Explained
Major 7 factors for the management of test environments
- A mechanism for focused sharing.
Generally, the teams frequently use generic data sources, which dilutes the testing efforts. Each application/system needs concentrated data to make the testing process quick. Thus, it is important to design a seamless sharing mechanism for the effective distribution of the data.
One can design a sharing mechanism by developing a link that connects to the different folds of data. Data may be divided into categories based on its importance or usage patterns. While the repository is being maintained, one can use new and updated data sets to replace the old ones.
- Managing the resources.
Here, the meaning of resources is the team of members working together for the testing function. It is one of the crucial factors for the transparency of test environment management. The testing team must be able to serve as performers of all the test-related activities.
At the corporate level, your resources team must use the same terminology. Certain firms disagree with this and are thus harmed by the lack of uniformity. A higher standard can help in proper understanding and improve efficiency in securing information.
At last, comes knowledge management of the members of the test environment. The team should have a well-structured knowledge base to manage the test environments. They should also make sure that the information is easily available to the final users.
- Cleaning up and maintaining the data.
The emphasis must be on keeping the test environment updated with new and fresh data sets. The environment can be useful from time to time during the testing. Thus, basic sanity is useful for speeding the tests for individual teams and fixing the expected gaps.
- Look for any downtime.
Generally, most companies have a support team for maintaining the testing environments, but there may come some time when a site can face downtime.
The support teams worldwide must ensure that all the environments are as per the latest standards. They can also use data compliance solutions for this purpose. It will aid in the smooth accessibility of the testing environments.
- Streamline the responsibilities.
There may arise issues that will need proper attention for a quick resolution. If these issues are assigned to the experts, one can expect an accurate and quick solution. Thus, deciding the responsibility is necessary.
You must assign the responsibilities properly to the maintenance teams. There should also be a process where one can request the queries from the right person. It helps in the quick resolution of the issues.
- Virtualization.
Every team needs resources. As a result, environments should be virtualized as much as feasible if at all practicable. As the test activity gets complete, the testers can share the components. One can have a dedicated OS, database, middleware, test framework, etc. It can also save a lot of costs.
- Test automation.
Testing is important for the release management software process. Thus, the test environment evolves with every test, and new frameworks are introduced. There’s a probability that the tests will have to run in comparable settings with identical components. Here, automation of tests will help and will also bring stability.
Conclusion
At last, we would say that there is a need for effective management of the testing environments in the organization. Also, companies need to make the optimal use of resources by cutting costs. Above, we have mentioned some of the factors that will help you effectively manage the testing environments and optimum utilization of resources.