The Testing Environment - Software Testing: Testing Across the Entire Software Development Life Cycle - page 158

deployed into production. Questions about the composition of the testing environment
should arise very early in the development project. The documentation during the
developers' Preliminary investigation and Analysis lifecycle stages should contain
a moderately detailed description of the target production environment for the new
software application or system. This will enable the test team to narrow its strategic
plan questions to just those platforms and software layers in Figure 4.4 that are actu-
ally needed to support the new application or system in production.
The goal of a testing environment is to cause the application under test to exhibit
true production behavior while being observed and measured outside of its produc-
tion environment. Achieving this goal can be just as challenging as designing and
executing the tests themselves.
The closer the operation of the testing environment to the production environ-
ment, the more valid the test results become. In many cases, the testing environment
can be set up truly identical to the production environment. Testing in this kind of
duplicate environment gives the developer and the end user an exceptionally accu-
rate view of how the new software will behave in production. The more dissimilar
the testing environment is from the production environment, the less valid the test
results become.

KEY TERMS

Simulations
Benchmarks
Test exe cut ion
Production behavior

Testing environment
Testing environment
control
Test d at a

Staging
Test r ep e at abi l it y