Cloud infrastructure initial analysis
The goal of the technical audit of the project is to analyse the current infrastructure capacity and find performance bottlenecks.
Test environments in the cloud era
Cloud-based environments are flexible and transparent. They enable test teams to check whether instructions are accurate and up to date, whereas permanent environments are more monolithic and unknowable: you can’t tell what patches have been made, nor what problems may have crept in overtime.
The latest research found that on average 40% of today’s testing budgets are being allocated to test infrastructure and hardware, with an additional 28% spent on testing tools. Furthermore, managing test infrastructure is requiring increased resource allocation due to the growing complexity in architecture and the variety of demands made on test environments. Organizations typically require multiple separate instances of test environments – anywhere between one and 25.
In addition, the separation of responsibilities between the testing organization that defines and uses the test environments and an infrastructure team that provides those environments is making this even more challenging.
Therefore, more organizations today are looking to transfer the responsibility for Test Environment Management to their testing organization.
Our Test Management team will focus on decrease issues with:
- Lack of appropriate test environment and data
- Inability to apply test automation at appropriate levels
- Difficulty in slicing test activities for more than one location for distributed Agile
- Early involvement of the testing team in the inception phase or sprint planning
- Difficulty in identifying the right areas on which test should focus
- Lack of professional test expertise in Agile teams
- Lack of a good testing approach that fits with the agile development method
- Difficulty to re-use and repeat tests across sprints/iterations
We also will use our expertise to reduce issues with test data management:
- Maintaining test data consistency across different systems under test
- Managing the size of test data sets
- Creating and maintaining test data that are not copied from production data
- Creating and retaining useful copies from production data
- Lack of test data for complex integration testing across systems
- and organizations
- Having to maintain the right test data set versions with different test versions
- Complying with data security and data privacy regulations for test data
- Finding the relevant test data in large test data sets
Benefits of Test Environment Management
- Lower test environment set-up and support costs.
- Flexible and faster test environment provisioning and support services delivery.
- End-to-end environment management.
- Greater co-ordination and control of change.
- Defined and measurable outcomes.
How does Test Environment Management deliver?
Because Automation is the Key to Cloud-Based Cost Savings we propose integrating automation into Test Environment Management.
This includes:
- Automated code packaging and deployment or builds.
- Baseline testing of a test environment post builds to ensure new defects have not been introduced.
- System monitoring and health check solutions.
- Baseline comparisons of configuration files.
- Database integrity checks.
- Automated reporting.
Related services:
Testing Management
In a management assessment the emphasis is mainly on leadership qualities. In this assessment the focus was on issues like independence, delegating and communication.
Automated testing challenges
The most important factor that drives test automation is the short development cycle. Agile teams have only a few weeks to get a grasp of the requirement, make the code changes, and test the changes. If all testing were to be done manually, the time required would surpass the actual development time. Alternatively, testing would have to be hurried, thus compromising on quality.
