The Testing Environment - Software Testing: Testing Across the Entire Software Development Life Cycle - page 150

Chapter 10

The Testing Environment

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

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to know what constitutes a testing environment
to know why testing environments are the most effective approach to measure the
behavior of software before it goes into production
to understand when a testing environment is normally set up and torn down
to know what testing environment setup issues challenge the test team
to know what testing environment control issues challenge the test team

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10.1 INTRODUCTION

Thus far, we have discussed test planning and a variety of ways to accomplish test
execution. The implicit assumption is that we know how to set up and tear down the
test execution environment(s) that are needed to carry out that test planning and
execution. The objective of this chapter is to examine the testing environment as a
legitimate and important testing topic itself.
A testing environment allows the testers to observe execution results that the
customer or user will actually experience in production before the software is
deployed into production. This testing environment approach should be compared
critically with similar sounding approaches that do not give equivalent results
or anything close. The two similar sounding approaches that you will hear pro-
posed most often in lieu of a good testing environment are simulations and bench-
marks. Both of these approaches provide valuable information to the software
development team, but that information is not as relevant as test execution results
in a good testing environment. Let us examine these similar sounding approaches
briefl y and determine why they do not give results comparable to test environment
execution.