Andy Yiu’s Blog

Testing environments - Useful or not?

I recently read an article assigned by MBA professor outlining how an organization in the Northeast was brought to its knees due to an experimental P2P program running on the network.  In that specific circumstance the program was designed to move streamline the data transfer from one node to another node.  Originally the program started out moving small bits of data and over time routers became overloaded as terabytes of data were transferred.  This article highlighted the importance of test environments.

Over the last few weeks I have had the opportunity to talk with different people and ask them if the customers they have worked with have up-to-date testing environments.  After polling various people it appears that a majority of companies do not have test environments which realistically mimic their production environment.  I would like to stress the value a testing environment.  By taking the time to build out and maintain a test environment that mimics the production environment, system administrators can save themselves a lot of time and headaches. All changes can be tested before implemeting the change in the production environment. With server virtualization packages, test environments do not have to be running all the time and hence physical machines can be multipurposed to serve as testing platforms for other applications.  So… with this I urge all companies to consider implemeting test environments.