How often is an environment unavailable due to factors within your project's
control? How often is an environment unavailable due to external factors? Is
the software and hardware in the environment up to date with the target
production systems? How often do you have to resort to manual workarounds due
to an environment?
These are all questions that you should ask yourself if testing environments
are consistently unavailable and affected by outages. Here are three key
metrics that you can track that can help avoid costly downtime.
Metric: Availability and Uptime Percentage
QA and staging environments seldom require the same level of uptime as
production, but tell that to a team of developers working 24/7 on a project
that has an aggressive deadline and you will have a very unhappy team. As a
test environment manager, you know that when a QA system is unavailable, you ... (more)
Companies, today, are finding that costs can be significantly reduced by
moving test environments to the cloud and implementing automated testing and
infrastructure. The temporary nature of test environments creates
opportunities to reduce the time it takes to cycle through individual tests.
If hours can be shaved down to minutes in the process of setting up an
environment, running a test and tearing down the environment, then budgets
for test environments can be cut considerably.
The impact of cloud adoption on test environments is a valuable advancement
in both cost savings an... (more)
In today's digitized world, a software glitch can create chaos. For example,
in July 2017, a glitch caused the stock prices of blue-chip Nasdaq companies
such as Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, eBay and Microsoft to be misreported on
websites long after that day's closing bell.
Even though the real-world prices of the stocks were unchanged, the sites
showed some had taken a nosedive in price and others had nearly doubled.
Unsurprisingly, investors were rattled and took to social media to debate the
false listings, dragging company names into a cloud of suspicion over
something that ha... (more)