Best test environment management practices to consider

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• Developing a high-quality software product and
  releasing it on time is a crucial thing in this
  cut-throat competition era.
• Software organizations are trying really hard to
  ensure that they release high-quality products
  that are bug-free and perform well to serve the
  core purpose.
• Establishing IT test environments and managing
  them can make things easy for organizations, but
  it is not as easy as it seems.
• IT environment management is a challenging task
  and you need to take several steps to achieve the
  objective.
• In this post, we will discuss some of the best IT
  environment management practices that can help
  organizations to ensure high-quality, highly
  functional, carefully tested and error-free
  software products released in a timely manner.
  Stay tuned!

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• Make a team of test environment management
• First and foremost thing you need to do is to
  establish an in-house team for test environment
  management who can take complete ownership.
• This team is the single point of contact for all
  test related processes and activities and is the
  sole responsible for test environment management.
  
• In the case of shared ownership models, we often
  see lack of accountability, poor management and
  irregular maintenance.
• However, when you have a dedicated team for test
  environment management, you will be able to
  eliminate all these issues.

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• Implementing thorough documentation
• If you want to manage multiple test environments,
  you need to make a habit of thorough
  documentation of all the processes, actions and
  steps such as resource allocation, various
  configurations, team-wise responsibility sharing
  and incidents.
• A test environment manager will be responsible
  for this detailed documentation. From acquiring
  and allocating test environment management tools
  to allocating other resources to monitoring
  progress of each team, the manager will ensure
  that everything is documented perfectly which can
  be shared internally to make processes more
  effective and quick.
• It will also help the organization to use this
  documented data in the future when similar
  projects arrive.

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• Standardization of language and terminology
• Using different terminologies is not a wise thing
  as it confuses stakeholders.
• It is important that the test environment manager
  ensures the same terminology is used throughout
  the project to avoid confusions and
  misinterpretations.
• It has been seen that different test and
  development teams use different terminologies
  internally, but the documentation becomes hard to
  interpret.
• When the terminology is the same, it is easy to
  manage the test environments.
• Also, language standardization will ensure quick
  and better understanding among teams which will
  result in sharing information quickly and
  efficiently.

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• Knowledge management
• Sharing available information and knowledge to
  all stakeholders and end users is an important
  thing to implement.
• Establishing a centralized test environment
  management team will ensure it.
• From test environment schedules to plans to
  solution documents to status reports to recovery
  procedures, everything must be shared among teams
  to make quick and right decisions.
• Automation
• Developing automation frameworks can improve the
  efficiency of test environments and this should
  be the first priority of the test environment
  manager.
• You can use test environment management tools
  available to achieve it. Activities you can
  automate are management of test data, auto
  provisioning and auto deployments and service
  virtualization.

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• Conclusion
• Managing multiple test environments, sometimes
  more than hundreds, is a difficult and
  challenging task.
• However, you can overcome these challenges by
  keeping a sharp eye on details and planning in
  advance.
• Test environment management is an important
  objective to achieve to ensure better delivery of
  high-quality software products.

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