Providing access quickly to the necessary test environments with proper conversations is increasingly challenging.
Here’s why:
- In testing transactions across today’s composite applications, it’s almost impossible to avoid interaction with dependent applications that are evolving, unavailable or difficult to access for testing.
- Organizations leveraging more iterative or agile development methods have multiple projects evolving dependent systems with different timelines. Rapidly evolving systems create significant complexity for staged test environments.
- Server virtualization can alleviate some of these dependencies, but significant time and costs are still required to acquire, set up, manage and constantly reconfigure them for various testing needs.
- Some dependent applications, such as third-party applications and mainframes, are not feasible to virtualize or stage. They can only be accessed during tightly controlled time frames with little freedom to configure them for the necessary testing needs.
- Test plans commonly require that tests be exercised against several different scenarios (expected responses, unexpected responses, delays, etc.). Accurately assessing the application under test's (AUT's) functionality typically requires testing against myriad permutations of dependent component behaviors.
