The Negative Impact of Inefficient Environment Management on Software Testing
Every software development company needs to think hard whether a lack of control over the non-productive environment is the fundamental reason due to which management of software environments fails big time. What is the ultimate cost of poor environment management?
It might be true that your teams might be functioning at full-throttle while using a test environment management tool when it comes to testing the production environment. However, many are not so fortunate as they do not have everything locked in decentralised local spreadsheets and emails.
Due to this very reason, it becomes difficult to maintain efficiency and version control, which results in configuration gaps, ultimately causing significant delays in software delivery. However, it is exceptionally vital to manage your environment language in businesses. There are hundreds of environments where the application needs to be tried and tested in today’s agile development requirements.
Without knowing the complete truth, it can become a time-consuming process that can cost your organisation a lot every year.
So, why exactly is there a challenge to have efficient environment management? Let’s try and answer this question.
If you are in a business that is totally dependent on software development, it is vital to be familiar with a variety of resources that need to be managed efficiently. There is a lot of complexity around. When you have a large number of applications, it requires more environments, ultimately resulting in more environment management. Still, 95% of organisations do not have any idea about what the environment looks like.
There are times when you will need more than one environment for each application. For example, if you wish to test a new feature before putting it into production, you will need to run it in an isolated test environment initially.
According to research conducted by the Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), Test Environment Management (TEM) users have to face the top three significant challenges:
Executing automated test environments (29%)
Lack of visibility into test environment inventory and availability (22%)
Configuration drift (19%)
Test cycles can be delayed by weeks and even months, mainly due to inefficient production environments that do not serve the purpose. So, now it is clear that with the number of environments increasing at a steady pace, centralisation is the way to go ahead in the near future.
According to a survey conducted by EMA research, inefficient environment management costs an average enterprise $ 1.4 million every year. This makes an organisation suffer a substantial loss. The good news is by using the right environment management tools; it is possible to reduce the time to provision environments. If you take the help of Jira release management tools like Apwide Golive, it can reduce the time considerably.
In simple words, this means if your organisation is employing an average of 188 environments, it is possible to save more than $128,000 every year. On top of this, the EMA research indicates that efficient environment management can assist you:
Decrease the time for an application to reach the production stage by a maximum of five weeks.
Save a maximum of $10,000 on every release in staff overheads.
Enhance application quality - which will result in a smaller help desk - with an average savings of approximately $ 2,500 on every release.
This means that the long-term gains of executing efficient environment management are far more significant than the short-term cost.