How Media and Entertainment Companies Achieve Test Environment Management Excellence
Test environment management (TEM) can be a headache for media and entertainment (M&E) companies. Building, maintaining and implementing a state-of-the-art test environment takes time, effort and money.
This weighty outlay demands a return on investment. This is where test environment management services offer a solution. They take care of creating and managing controlled testing environments. This includes the processes, governance and scheduling involved. In short, TEM services make it easier for you to understand and manage your test environments and data, giving you less to worry about.
In this article, you’ll learn about the benefits and challenges of TEM for M&E brands. This includes our top tips for implementing effective test environments. You’ll also discover real-world examples of how other M&E providers have managed their test environments successfully.
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What is test environment management?
The goal of TEM is to provide a consistent and reliable environment for testing. This results in higher software quality and a better end-user experience. It also leads to fewer problems.
Imagine the nightmare of downtime or disruptions for major streaming platforms or live news portals. With TEM, you can quickly identify and fix issues in secure, mirrored environments. This means fewer risks of costly downtime or delays.
TEM encompasses planning, coordinating and controlling resources and activities required to establish a stable and efficient environment for quality engineering. It involves configuring test hardware, software and infrastructure components to closely replicate the production environment.
TEM also covers:
Challenges of managing test environments for media platforms
Managing test environments can be tricky for M&E companies. Here are six common hurdles they may face:
1. Complexity
Test environments can be complex with various configurations, versions and platforms to support. Keeping track of these elements and ensuring they’re up to date can be difficult to juggle.
2. Availability
Test environments can be in high demand. This leads to difficulties in ensuring their availability when needed. Conflicts may arise when two or more teams or projects need access to the same resources.
3. Data management
Managing test data, especially sensitive or confidential data, can be another hiccup. Properly securing and managing test data, while ensuring it’s available when needed, is crucial for successful testing.
4. Cost
Setting up and maintaining test environments can be costly, especially when specialized hardware or software is required. Media companies need to weigh up their investment in test environments.
5. Coordination and communication
Test environments often involve many teams and stakeholders. Coordinating and communicating with these groups can be tricky. You need to ensure that everyone is on the same page and working toward the same goals.
6. Change management
Changes to the production environment can impact the test environment. Keeping track of these changes and ensuring thorough testing is a task that requires careful attention.
Effective TEM needs detailed planning and coordination. It also demands a deep understanding of the testing process and your organization's specific needs.
Address these challenges head-on, and you can enhance your testing processes and achieve more efficient and reliable outcomes.
Benefits of effective test environment management
A well-managed test environment enables media and entertainment companies to conduct full and reliable testing. This lets you run controlled and consistent testing with all the necessary resources and configurations in place.
This offers many advantages, including:
TEM ensures the quality of products and services by testing new features and changes in a secure, controlled environment. This lets you detect and rectify problems before they’re released to customers.
As bugs are more likely to be caught in an isolated test environment, TEM also helps you find and fix issues more quickly. This saves time and money.
Testing upgrades and new features in a controlled environment also minimizes the risk of production outages or disruptions.
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Test environments can help M&E companies meet data privacy and security regulations.
6 best practices for implementing test environment management
For top M&E brands, implementing a successful test environment management (TEM) process is crucial for enhancing software quality. You can achieve this too, by following these six guidelines:
1. Define your requirements
Determine the types of testing needed and what environments are required to support them. Allocate resources and establish processes accordingly. Use real user-like accounts to validate critical business functions. Keep test environments closely resembling production.
2.?Establish processes
Define the steps required to create, provision, configure and maintain test environments.
As more and more test data are created in test environments, data quality may be lost. Refresh the test environment from production to maintain data quality.
3. Standardize configurations
Develop standard configurations for test environments to ensure consistency and reduce errors. Define baseline configurations for operating systems, middleware and other components.
4. Automate processes
Use automation tools to streamline the creation and maintenance of test environments. This saves time and effort and cuts errors. It also enables scalability for load and stress testing.
Test data creation should be well-documented and scripted for automation. It should also use a naming convention to distinguish it from live data.
5. Manage access
Secure your test environments for:
Establish policies, define user roles and responsibilities, and put security controls in place to prevent unauthorized access.
6. Monitor and report
Continuously monitor test environments to ensure they’re functioning properly. Regularly report on their status. This includes:
Set up TEM monitors to detect problems early and take corrective actions before they impact the production environment.
By following these guidelines, you can establish an effective TEM process that supports your testing needs and enhances software quality.
Success stories
Here’s how Qualitest helped a couple of media and entertainment brands implement TEM successfully.
Media client 1
Issue: Simulating different subscription and pricing models across multiple geolocations.
Challenges: Insufficiently captured specifications; Limited understanding of interdependencies and workflows; Managing geographically dispersed infrastructures lacking standardized configurations.
Approach: Qualitest optimized shared services management processes for improved efficiency. We also implemented service/objective-level agreements to enhance collaboration and goal alignment among teams. Plus, we employed version control and automated infrastructure provisioning on cloud platforms across different geolocations.
Media client 2
Issue: Simulating real user traffic across multiple distribution platforms before major events like presidential elections or TV series launches.
Challenges: Inadequate representation of live test data for major events; Dealing with environment complexity and availability.
Approach: Qualitest implemented a scalable content delivery network to efficiently distribute content. We also leveraged edge computing for faster response times, addressing environment complexity and ensuring availability.
Conclusion
TEM is an important part of the quality engineering process. Investing in reliable test environment management solutions can help M&E companies improve the quality of their digital products and services. It’s the key to increasing efficiency, reducing risk and improving regulatory compliance.
By prioritizing TEM, M&E companies can build a strong foundation for continuous improvement. This enables them to deliver digital experiences that captivate customers and keep them coming back for more.