Despite the two alternatives, organization will typically gravitate to the latter due to budget constraints. With this in mind, here are 4 best practices (tips) that you might apply to reduce your risks and ensure positive & qualatative outcomes when building a “Performance Test Environment”.

• Acknowledge the difference – And ensure risk is understood by all decision makers.
• Keep the test environment consistent – Consistency will allow you to baseline & trend.
• Performance Model – Bridge the gap & supplement your results with modelling & extrapolation. Understand application behaviour differences as you scale vertically or horizontally.
• Leverage Cloud – Use a public cloud to build a temporary Performance Test Environment

It is dangerous to recommend a “scaled down environment” as it is always a compromise and “when things go wrong” they often go wrong in “fantastic” style. However, the reality is most organizations can’t afford to spend millions of dollars to support an application or project. As such scaling down may be the only feasible option and if that is the case then take into consideration the tips specified here.

Independent of your choice, remember that no matter how “production” like your Test Environments are, there are always differences and you should be prepared to continually understand these deltas and refine accordingly. Ultimately it is as much an Art as it is a Science.

Jane Temov (author) is a Senior Environment Architect at Enov8. She has over 15 years of experience working across the IT industry in Europe & APAC and specializes in Technical Testing, Test Environment Management, Test Data and Release Operations.

TEM (DOT) COM is pleased to announce the 9^th Edition of the World Quality Report from Capgemini, SOGETI and MicroFocus. This 2018 report continues to represent and promote the world of Test Environments Management with a whole chapter dedicated to “Test Data Management and Test Environment Management” information.

This year’s brief captures the response from over 1600 executives across 32 countries.

Here are TEMDOTCOMS favourite 5 statistics

• 46% of respondents identified “a lack of appropriate test environments and data” to be biggest challenge facing Agile Development
• 41% of respondents identified “lack of facilities to book and manage test environments”
• 48% of respondents identified “an inability to manage excess Test Environments demand”
• 47% of respondents identified “a lack of visibility of test environment availability”
• 38% of respondents identified “defects due to environment misconfiguration “

For more details on other stats across Test Environments & Test Data, or across other Quality & DevOps topics then download a complete copy of the report here. Get your copy here: https://www.capgemini.com/service/world-quality-report-2017-18/

Our Summary of WQR findings

While organizations continue to invest significantly in testing & QA, it is still apparent based on this year’s findings and previous years (please refer 2016, 2017) that most organizations continue to struggle with the more complex aspect of Test Operations (Test Environments & Data Management).

On the upside however, the release of the report does indicate an ongoing elevation of awareness which will hopefully result in a change to behaviour, WQR trends (in future editions) and ultimately investment in tooling and enterprise outcomes.