Introduction
Imagine building and selling a new plane without ever performing a test flight. Would you want to be one of the first customers traveling on it? In the world of enterprise software deployment, this is similar to deploying a new application without proper testing in a dedicated environment. While the pressure to launch quickly and save budget can be overwhelming, neglecting a robust realistic testing environment can lead to delays, cost overruns, and even failure. This is where the importance of a dedicated test environment comes into play.
The Benefits of a Dedicated Test Environment
A test environment is where developers, testers, and other team members can evaluate product functionality, performance, and security before promoting it. It's a place to test new features and identify bugs, making them easier and less expensive to fix without impacting customers. Proper testing mitigates the risk of critical issues occurring in production, which can be damaging in several ways to the well being of the company.
Testing your deployment often also allows you to exercise your data migration strategy and catch data quality issues before they happen in higher environments.
The test environment is also the place where you should be able to define and refine your OS, network, firewall, and load balancer request, configuration, and build processes. Through trial and error in the test environment, you can document discrepancies and make corrections prior to promotion to the higher environments.
Refining your automated deployment process requires practice. The more you deploy to the test environment, the more you are able to refine the scripts and processes involved to ensure a smooth deployment.
In addition to the deployment processes, thorough testing of the application and integration with other applications and APIs allows you to identify a plethora of possible bugs that may occur. These include replication/synchronization errors, schema configuration, unexpected Application/API behavior, performance issues/bottlenecks, missing or erroneous monitoring alerts, logging and auditing issues, among others. It also instills confidence for the deployment team and management stakeholders that they are delivering a quality product that meets or exceeds business requirements. And finally, performance testing within a dedicated environment helps ensure the product deployment scales and can handle real-world user loads.
Investing in a Test Environment
While building and maintaining a dedicated test environment requires an initial investment, the strategic benefits far outweigh the costs. By avoiding costly rollbacks, bug fixes in production, and potential security breaches, a test environment can significantly improve the overall quality of the end result. A good test environment will be robust enough to perform simulated load testing. It should be configured similar to production in relation to High Availability and Load Balancing. The test environment should integrate with a test version of the same applications and APIs as production whenever possible. Lastly, it should contain a similar data footprint to ensure testing is as realistic as possible.
The bottom line is that you want it to simulate the production environment as much as possible, but on a lesser scale. Sometimes it may be necessary to substitute due to licensing or resource constraints. The more you substitute, the more risk you assume due to divergence from realistic testing scenarios.
Conclusion
Because companies rely on their online presence significantly more than any other time in history, delivering high-quality, reliable applications is paramount. A dedicated test environment serves as the cornerstone of a successful deployment and development process, allowing development, deployment, and testing teams to incrementally innovate and test new ideas , minimize risks, and deliver a superior user experience. By prioritizing thorough and realistic testing, delivery teams can ensure their software is ready for the real world, avoiding the pitfalls of unexpected outcomes.
