Vendor Accent

Test Lab Management

Rajesh Patil talks about how to leverage Test Lab environments to the fullest

Testing activities are an integral part of the strategic alignment to the business and for many organizations relying on technology as the differentiator, this is a critical aspect. Testing activities are firmly placed in the value chain creation process to be the differentiator for new products and services that are required to serve the dynamic nature of business. Organizations have realized that they need to get testing right for creating and keeping credibility with customers as well as partners.

One of the main challenges in testing is the cost and effort required to setup, maintain and manage and test an environment. Test environments are quite capital intensive on the onset and require significant operational budget to keep the environments running. Historically, the utilization of the computing resources in any given organization has been less than optimal.

Test environments are logistical challenges when organizations share computing resources for testing activities. This is increasingly the norm. With centralized testing becoming mainstream, the first order of business is to centralize computing resources, processes and resources. Every development group plans to get the most of the test environment for delivering a better product. This leads to challenges as many groups may vie for the same set of computing resources. Test environments especially for performance testing require a physical environment that is similar to the production environment so as to perform the testing under real life scenarios. There are multiple challenges due to the various testing requirements, needs and duration.

Challenges of Managing Test Environments:

• Multiple configurations: Configurations/versions that require a combination of specific hardware, software. In software alone, there are dependencies on patches and versions across the application suite and underlying technology platform. For performance testing, the need is to setup an environment which is similar to the production environment for load and stress tests. These tests are usually run for a few days if not hours and then will be idle for a period of time. The requirement is one of a large number of computing resources for a relatively short duration.
• Commission and decommission: Setting up the environment as per specifications and then decommissioning the same for other projects. This effort is the single biggest contributor to the time and cost for Test Environment management. This can be quite error prone due to the various combinations of Operating System and application stacks. Lack of efficiencies from this task prevent an organization from tapping into the existing computing hardware as needed–an option to move some of the existing hardware from other environments for a ramp-up for a specific test.
• Scheduling: This usually is a slice of time allocated to a specific project/release. Lead times to get an environment setup are quite large and in some instances exceed the actual time taken for testing. Scheduling has to be coordinated between development, quality and operations groups. Ensuring the availability of environment, the delivery of code and completion of the testing per the specs takes pre-planning and flawless execution. The non completion of the testing activity will impact the quality and extending the testing time will lead to other scheduling challenges.
• Operations: Change, Release, Configuration management processes followed to ensure that the environment setup complies with the requirements. This ensures that there are no surprises during testing from the Operating System and/or application code.
• Uptime: This directly impacts the testing efforts and the quality output after the effort. Non-availability of the environment will compromise the quality of testing and reduce the actual time spent finding bugs. Though the expectation on availability is not as much as any production environment, it has to be pretty close.
• Resources: Diversified needs from software, hardware and operational skills to setup, configure and manage the requirements.
  Optimal requirements for Test Environments are flexibility, reliability, lowest time to setup and cost effectiveness.
  Quite a few of the listed challenges are addressed via these approaches:
• Virtualization: Enables running multiple configurations on a hardware platform increasing the capacity and utilization of the resources. These are easy to setup, configure and manage. There are new generation tools bundled with management consoles making it easy to setup using a simple point-and-click interface.
• Configuration tools: Specialized tools to provision servers and hardware are available and quite mature. The enable environments to be setup at a rapid pace and in some instances can recreate a specific configuration on demand. These combined with virtualization tools deliver most of the requirements for an optimal setup and operational Test Lab.
• Operations: Following a mature operational processes based on ITIL/MOF will ensure the efficient and smooth execution of tasks required to create and maintain the environment. Tools used in production can be extended to include Test Lab management for maximum benefits.

A combination of the tools, technology and processes are available to setup and run a Test Lab in the most efficient way. Using the Test Lab environments to the fullest is becoming one of the top priorities for organizations for cost effectiveness.

The traditional approach of adding more hardware without exploiting the existing capacity is fraught with both cost and operational issues in the long run. As organizations are becoming more cost and environment conscious, this specific area can provide benefits.

The author is Assistant Vice President at AppLabs