A list of the top 8 Anti-Patterns* found in organizations Test Environment Management space. Anti-Patterns that cause disruption, low productivity, delivery delays and unwanted costs. And conversely recommended patterns to replace them.

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Test Environment Management
The Top 8 Anti Patterns (& Patterns) of TEM

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Test Environment Anti Patterns
A list of the top 8 Anti-Patterns* found in organizations
Test Environment Management space. Anti-Patterns
that cause disruption, low productivity, delivery delays
and unwanted costs. And conversely recommended
patterns to replace them.
*Definition: Anti-Pattern.
An Anti-Pattern is basically a commonly occurring
approach to a problem or task that generates decidedly
negative consequences.

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1 Death by Spreadsheet
Anti-Pattern:
The enterprise is heavily reliant on spreadsheets to
identify current applications/platforms under
management, their components, versions and the
projects using them. These spreadsheets often get out
of date, are non-integrated across teams & regularly
become unwieldy.
Pattern:
A centralised Configuration Management Database or
Knowledge Portal that all teams can use for
visualisation, modelling and ongoing-management of
systems, components, relationships, versions, and of
course relationships

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2. System Contention Hell
Anti-Pattern:
Different teams “reactively” compete for the same system /
platform resources and components, causing test
disruption & outages due to continual changes and re-
configurations. Collaboration across projects is typically
very low and often results in finger pointing and
arguments.
Pattern:
Project requirements are identified early in the lifecycle
and the correct system resources are shared with the
most compatible teams. In areas of high contention, the
organisation has time to provision new environments
and/or re-prioritise to meet the spike in demand.

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3 Ninja Changes
Anti-Pattern:
Developers deploy changes during operational hours,
without prior notice and re-configure applications on
the fly. The test teams are blind-sided, experience
unwanted disruption and defects arise that are often
difficult to recreate or track.
Pattern:
All environment activity is collaborated through group
calendars that highlight scheduled events and status.
Affected teams are notified of any changes, via alerts
or dashboarding, that may impact their project or
team.

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4 The Email Support Vortex
Anti-Pattern:
Members across the project use email as a method to
request test environment support and coordinate
operational fulfilment. High volumes of emails go across
different teams and fail to convey ownership, accountability
or correct operational procedures. Thus, requests become
overwhelming, uncoordinated and are often ignored or lost.
Pattern:
All environments, whether production or test, need a basic
level of service management to prevent operational chaos.
Although not necessarily as “heavy” as production, the
organisation needs “just enough” service management to
ensure all requirements are captured, tracked & closed.

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5 Superhero Provisioning
Anti-Pattern:
Deployment Operations (across data, application &
infrastructure) are unrepeatable, manual, slow and
error prone. They typically involve heroics from one or
more subject matter experts and the use of “black
magic”. This chaotic approach consequently results in
disruption to the end users i.e. project and test teams.
Pattern:
Organisations need to establish consistent /
standardized tasks that are clearly documented and
understood. Ideally these operations should evolve to
become fully automated, “Single command line” tasks
that can be exposed through “Self Service” forms.

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6 Manual Health Checks
Anti-Pattern:
Every morning the test team will get in early (the crack of
dawn) to run various functional tests that ensure the
application and the end-to-end business processes are
working. Results are then emailed to the test teams.
Process is typically time-consuming and typically can only
be done once a day.
Pattern:
Implementation of Test Synthetics that can automatically
run at any time of the day, (scheduled or in real time) to
provide immediate insight into whether the end-to-end
environments are healthy. Results can be communicated
via real-time dashboards and automated alerts.

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7 Stopping the Clock
Anti-Patterns:
Testing and projects are often delayed due to the various
delivery teams not being available to service them. For
example, the infrastructure team are too busy to provide more
virtual test environments, the deployment team are too busy to
release the latest code version and the data team don’t have
time to provide new test data.
Pattern:
Establishment of Self Service orchestration gateways (portals
where provisioning automation is exposed & shared) will
ultimately mean much of the “busy” work previously done by
the Infrastructure, Application or Data team can be completed
by the testers or project team themselves.

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8 Creative Reporting
Anti-Pattern:
The test environment & release management teams
spend many days (potentially weeks) per month
collating and analysing non-integrated environment &
release information with the intent of creating reports.
Typically resulting in reports which are invariably
inaccurate & untimely (out of date).
Pattern:
Establish automated environment information
aggregation that brings together all your IT
environment & release information and generates real-
time reports and dashboards that support analytics
and decision making.

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Thankyou
If you’d like to know how to avoid anti-patterns and address
all the above and more, then please ask for a demonstration
of enov8 Environment Manager.
A complete solution for your Test Environment Managers,
including features for: Visual Configuration Management,
Project Demand Management & Test Environment Bookings,
Environment Calendaring, Service Management, Self
Service, Test Synthetics, Environment Dashboarding and
Automation Integration & Orchestration.
References:
https://www.enov8.com/blog/test-environment-anti-patterns/