The provisioning and setup of test environments and everything that comes with it, is a major point of concern for DevOps teams in most organizations. This is because in DevOps the responsibility for the infrastructure has shifted from a separate department to the DevOps team itself. As a result of this shift, some important parts of the infrastructure's quality become a team responsibility. Knowledge of the infrastructure helps the team to ultimately improve the quality of the IT system as a whole.
To achieve this, it is essential that every team member has a basic understanding of the IT system's infrastructure and its constituent parts.
Example of constituent parts of an IT system.
As described in the World Quality Report, organizations are discovering that just putting the responsibility for test infrastructure with the individual teams often does not bring the best results for the organization as a whole. Organizations need to create a greater awareness of the issues that surround test environments; these include mappings, integration points and configurations that will make them fit for purpose. Organizations will benefit from implementing cloud-based test environments, but also virtualized, containerized and temporary-but-non-cloud-based test environments. Creating the relevant strategies (such as a virtualization strategy) cannot be expected from individual DevOps teams. Therefore, the organization will need a specialized support team that, amongst others, with the use of automated provisioning technologies, assists the DevOps teams in provisioning fit-for-purpose test environments. Apart from making the work of the individual DevOps teams more effective, in the end this will also raise the cost-efficiency for the organization.
| Test infrastructure consists of the facilities and resources necessary for the satisfactory execution of the test. It consists (among others) of test environments, test tools and workplaces. |
| A test environment is a composition of parts, such as hardware and software, connections, environment data, tools and operational processes in which a test is carried out. |
A topic closely connected to test infrastructure is test data management. This is described as a separate topic in Testdata Management (TDM).
In a DevOps environment, multiple parts need to be addressed regarding Infrastructure. The below picture gives an overview of the subjects to cover. Below the picture you can proceed for more in depth information.
1 |
Infrastructure-as-code |
2 |
Infrastructure verification |
3 |
Easily set up environments |
4 |
Workstations and other infrastructure |