Mastering Test Environment Management: Strategies and Best Practices
Tags: testing, testenvironment, testautomation, automation
Published: 2024-01-03 05:48:32

Launching a software product isn’t successful until it passes a stringent test process.

Therefore, it becomes essential that an organization masters [test environment management](https://hubs.ly/Q02f3f-R0) with perfect strategies and best practices to ensure the delivery of a successful software product. TEM helps to improve the quality of software, speed up the testing processes, and increase time-to-market.

This article explores why TEM is essential, along with the challenges, benefits, and the process of implementing TEM in your organization. Let’s get started.

## What is Test Environment Management?

Test Environment Management (TEM) is an important process in software testing that ensures the streamlined delivery of high-quality software. It offers a validated and stable environment that enables the execution of test scenarios and the replication of bugs.

This proactive process takes responsibility for managing and scheduling test environment activities efficiently to help organizations accelerate their testing processes, enhance software quality, and expedite product releases.

Organizations adopt TEM to enable optimization of the testing process to ultimately enhance the quality of software. Now, we will discuss the importance of TEM in detail to help you understand why TEM is called the backbone of software testing.

## Why is Test Environment Management Important?

TEM is indeed the backbone of efficient and reliable software testing. Because it plays an essential role in delivering high-quality software solutions while optimizing resources and reducing IT costs. In this section, we will discuss the importance of test environment management in detail.

Consider a situation where a company leverages multiple test environments for its projects. Now, some test environments are underused, and some are overburdened, resulting in unnecessary expenses for resources that aren't fully utilized and delays due to resource shortages. This is one of the scenarios where TEM can help you manage and allocate your resources efficiently.

Additionally, test environment management ensures that you are able to reduce the software testing time, ensuring timely product releases to the market. TEM enables you to set up test environments quickly in order to perform continuous testing on the frequent updates of agile development rapidly. Hence, this is why you need TEM to deliver high-quality software efficiently and release the product in the market faster to stay competitive in today's tech landscape.

As you have understood the importance of implementing test environment management, it is also essential that you know the implementation process of TEM in your company. So, let’s go ahead.

## How to Implement TEM in Your Company?

To yield the maximum results, it is essential that you implement TEM in your company with the right approach, as this strategic implementation not only enhances testing efficiency but also significantly elevates the overall software quality and reliability.

**1. Define Your TEM Requirements**

Assess the exact needs of your test environment, which may include hardware, software, network configurations, and data.

**2. Establish Environment Governance**

A governance structure is essential to control and monitor test environments, establish communication routes, and impose accountability for the TEM team.

**3. Develop a TEM Strategy**

It should outline how you will manage and optimize your test environments, including configuration, data management, and release coordination.

**4. Implement Automation**

To reduce manual error and accelerate the testing process, implement [automation tools](https://hubs.ly/Q02f3g6P0) to streamline environment provisioning, configuration, and data setup.

**5. Implement Change Control**

Change control helps monitor the updates of test environments and ensures changes are documented, tested, and approved before implementation.

**6. Monitoring and Improvement**

Continuously monitor the performance of your TEM system, collect relevant metrics, and use this data to improve the process and tools.

These key steps will help you build a solid foundation for implementing TEM so that you reap its maximum benefits. If you want to know how to do it with the test environment best practices, then check the next section.

## Embracing Test Environments With Good Practices

Embracing testing environment best practices is all about ensuring efficient and effective software development and testing processes. Hence, we have come up with the best strategies to improve software quality and faster time-to-market for products and services.

i. To ensure everyone is informed about the tests, a centralized source of the environment is essential; it can possibly be integrated into existing project management tools for better visibility.

ii. Be transparent with the team about the test environment allocation plans to ensure everyone knows the current and future status of the environments to promote seamless resource allocation and conflict prevention.

iii. Relying on manual updates could be risky. Hence, integrate the TEM tool with other toolchains, ensuring up-to-date and trustworthy environment inventory for stakeholders.

iv. One of the test environment best practices is regularly assessing TEM performance by tracking key metrics like environment uptime and availability percentage, enabling necessary adjustments to align with testing requirements and resource allocation.

Following these testing environment best practices will ensure that you optimize the quality of software effectively. Now, let’s check how TEM can significantly reduce testing bottlenecks and accelerate time to market.

## Benefits of Test Environment Management

Implementing the right Test Environment Management (TEM) approach can accelerate project and release schedules by 25%, optimize infrastructure costs by 5-10%, and increase productivity by 30%. Effective TEM significantly reduces testing bottlenecks and ensures a stable, controlled environment for successful software releases. Below are the top benefits of TEM:

i. Ensures stakeholders have **end-to-end visibility and up-to-date IT system information**, preventing issues from outdated or incorrect data.

ii. Enables you to **test frequently and shortens development cycles** by detecting and addressing errors, minimizing the need for major overhauls.

iii. Helps in **reducing setup and service costs** by having a process for managing non-production environments.

iv. Helps in **automating test environment provisioning** for quicker responses to changes and faster product launches.

v. **Reduces the time to market and cost of testing** by offering an efficient way of testing products and using resources.

vi. **Minimizes disruptions across the development process** with consistent testing, keeping projects on track and enhancing QA effectiveness.

Though TEM has a lot of benefits, it comes with its own set of challenges that need to be tackled efficiently to ensure you get the maximum results. Let’s discuss the challenges in the next section.

## Challenges in Test Environment Management

Addressing the following challenges in TEM is essential in order to plan tests carefully, maintain processes, and streamline environment management.

i. **Unstable Environment:** When management's requirements aren't clearly understood or communicated, it often leads to frequent changes in the test environment later on.

ii. **Shared Environment Assets:** Test and development teams often share resources, which conflicts with inadequate consolidation and tracking of test environment assets, leading to inefficient resource allocation.

iii. **Need for an Up-to-date Environment:** An outdated environment often leads to inaccurate test results and consistency. While it may appear to be a minor task, its significance should not be overlooked.

iv. **Delay in Environment Setup:** When a development team starts a new project, the testing environment should be instantly ready for performing various tests. Delays in this setup can make the team wait and slow down the entire process.

v. **Remote Environment:** Geographically placed test environments can create dependency on remote support teams to deal with challenges related to hardware, software, and networking, resulting in delays, particularly when teams operate in different time zones.

## Bottom Line

Through this article, you get to learn how you can strategize the high-quality test process using the best test environment practices. In fact, you will be able to mitigate the challenges and implement TEM to optimize resource utilization, ultimately leading to cost-effective and reliable software development.