Quality Assurance Organizations: Test Environment Configuration
Imagine that long test development phase is completed during which you had to play back the scripts to ascertain that they work as desired, and then you have planned a relatively short four-week effort for configuration of a test environment. First of all, it is necessary to purchase client workstations and servers. Five-day and ten-day estimates, respectively, are indicative of a clear and lightweight acquisition process. Also, the environment elements consist of quite ordinary hardware-software available on the open market. No customized hardware and software development, special orders or something similar are contemplated for a given product. Those who worked on several projects using custom hardware are well aware of lengthy periods they involve to create the systems.
Be informed that quality assurance organizations help to prevent bugs and efforts in developed products and ensure that these will meet customer expectations. Identify and resolve all the problems before your products are put in real-world environment.
The configuration and setup effort towards the test environment is mainly borne by system operations and administration groups. Three-day and ten-day of turnaround times for client hardware and servers indicate that the group can respond quickly to the test manager’s requests. There are people that worked on projects where it was not the case, especially where the network operations groups to support these operations were spread too thin. In some cases, security issues arise while servers are being set up, especially if servers must be integrated in the corporate network. All these factors must be taken into account. Mobile testing services are used to make mobile application work flawlessly across a multitude of mobile devices.
A complex test environment can take a lot of time and much effort to setup and configure. On one project, a certain testing specialist spent approximately two person-months planning and managing the configuration of the test environment. A certain Network Operations team spent 36 man-months setting up and configuring test equipment.
It happens that the effort required to set up and configure the test environment is trivial. On one project, a certain tester had to buy a single PC workstation, replace the processor and add RAM to the server. He spent about one man-day of effort, including ordering, getting, connecting to the network, installing hardware and checking the configuration. Nevertheless, the duration of the phase was about three weeks, since he and his client had to agree upon the environment in which the application was intended to be tested. Load testing services allow you to verify performance of any software app under specified conditions.