A high proportion of “Test Related” costs* are associated with Test Environment and Data problems.
These problems range from:
- Poor Test Environment Requirements
- Test Environment Un-Readiness
- Test Data not Fit for Purpose
- Test Environment Misconfiguration
- Test Environment Unsuitability
- Test Data can’t be found
- Test Environment Outages
- Test Data Referential Integrity issues/Breakage
- Test Environment or Data Resource Contention &
- Test Data Non-Compliant (Security Risk)
In an attempt to address these issues, a focused and timely Test Environment Management (TEM) and Test Data Management (TDM) ability is necessary. That is, an ability that promotes the understanding of one’s Environments and applies that knowledge, with appropriate mix of governance, technology and resource to provision and share environments based on business & project needs. Niall Crawford (CTO) of Enov8 (and previously a Test Environments, Configuration Management & ITIL Practitioner) believes 10 key areas must be addressed as you evolve your TEM & TDM maturity, these are:
- ENV Knowledge Management (understand your E2E domains, components & status)
- Release/Project/BAU awareness (capture & control environment requirements)
- Appropriate Non-Prod Service Management (Lean Change, Incident, Event Mgmt etc.)
- Orchestration Methods (automation of common tasks e.g. deploy & configure)
- Continuous Shakedown (E2E monitoring of application/ product health)
- Rapid Data Provisioning (through automated ETL or Fabrication Methods)
- Production Like Test Data (through a combination of ETL & Masking methods)
- Rapid Test Data Mining Facilities for DevTesters (productivity in preparation & execution)
- Test Data Fit for Purpose Validation (based on Developer, Tester & Compliance needs)
- Usage Analytics to understand Environment & Data behaviour & promote optimisation
For further information visit Enov8.com.