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Making testing better by leveraging environments... let's do this!

By Mike Chambers posted 11-10-2021 04:00 PM

  

I’ve been thinking about testing lately. And I’ve been trying to figure out ways to make it faster and easier while maintaining quality. With time and resources continually being strained to a breaking point, we are all trying to come up with ways to make things better without increasing risk or cost.

Gina Fogelsonger’s recent blog post about non-production environments inspired me to think about things in a new way. Gina lists how each environment is used at her institution for different purposes -- developing, training, testing, etc.  I was most intrigued by her remarks about a dedicated reporting environment where a daily snapshot of production is used for running resource-intensive reports. And then it hit me... What if we could use non-production environments to make our testing better, faster and cheaper?

Let me pause for just a moment and paint you a picture of what led me to this point.

At Boise State our Oracle financial ERP and HCM systems are on the cloud. We receive a patch bundle from Oracle in a test environment every three months on a strict schedule.  We have only two weeks to test and confirm functionality and to develop workarounds for any new issues we may find. We also need to communicate any unexpected changes and workarounds to back office and campus end users in that compressed time. Two weeks. Two non-negotiable weeks. Because it all goes into production on a schedule. Ready or not.

So, of course, we’ve worked hard to improve our testing turnaround time. The strategy is simple: increase the amount of time we have to fix issues and communicate workarounds to end users by finishing our testing quickly and accurately. Oh, and do this without sacrificing the quality of our testing or increasing risk.

Luckily, we operate in the very collegial, collaborative and supportive environment of Higher Ed, so we’ve been helped tremendously by our HEUG colleagues’ advice, brainstorming and shared knowledge.

We’ve found that success in streamlining testing is made possible by these essential elements:

  • Leadership’s support of the vision
  • An emphasis on reducing “testing fatigue” among staff
  • A focus on critical, must-have functionality 
  • A continuous improvement mindset

Say what?! Did you think I was gonna try to tell you that our success is made possible by testing automation, error-free patches and unlimited testing resources? If only it were so!

I keep thinking about testing and talking to others to brainstorm new ideas. I co-wrote an article with Brooke Barton, a colleague at Boise State's Office of Continuous Improvement,  about a collaborative approach to testing and I’ve shared a template of a test plan with metrics, which is stored in the Project & Change Management’s document library along with other awesome resources. But Gina’s article makes me think that there must be ways that we haven’t discovered yet to leverage our use of non-production environments to make our quality assurance tasks more efficient. 

Consider this...

  • What if we could use multiple environments to save time with testing? What would that look like? 
  • Could we use automated scripts for running time consuming processes or repetitive tasks in one environment and focus our hands-on testing in a different one?
  • How might we leverage multiple environments to assist with change management? Or with early adoption of workarounds?

I wonder if there are approaches that you can think of that could be used to make testing and end user adoption better? faster? more enjoyable? I’d love to hear your ideas about what you think might be possible.

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