During the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) is on play, the test environment may be required by developers and testers. It may be costing to have two similar test environments (one is for developers, other is for testers). But on the other hand, there are some environments which do not cost more and can be easily setup. When it comes to too cost to setup the environment, usually the testing team and developers share the resources to test. This sharing feature, may put conflicts between these two technicians (developers & testers). To avoid such conflicts, it is the must to make sure that the testing environment is managed and controlled very well with procedures.
When setting up a test environment, there are many things to be considered, such as, the business processes which the software is going to be applied, organizational procedures where the software is going to be used, the end-users who is going to operate the software and etc. The vital benefit of setting up proper test environment and test data management is that, these can be reproduced and easy to manage for future testing for different versions/upgrades of the product. The test environment should be reliable to produce the results similar to results which can be produced by end-users of it.
The test environment requirement specification is generated early in the software development life cycle. Anyhow later days, it is usually altered to make sure that, it is effective and reliable to simulate the real operations by end-users. By initiating the test environment specification at initial stage, it is quick and easy to develop and setup the environment and test data for testing. The test environment depends on the product that is going to be tested as well as other methods and tools which will be applied during testing process.
It is vital to take care of developing and managing test environment to reduce extra cost during testing phase of Software Development Life Cycle.