March 1, 2012 at 10:20 pm
Let's say our enterprise applications include an ERP, dedicated CRM, dedicated asset management, data warehouse, biztalk, and so on (it does).
Now, let's say each of these is generally somewhere in a release cycle (we get a new version of the ERP about every 3 months).
How do people organise the testing environments when there are so many parallel versions of integrated systems?
Let me give you an example of the problem. Say CRM 1.0 is in production, and ERP 1.0 as well.
ERP 1.0 is also in UAT, since UAT is the "hotfix" environment for the current production version. Similarly, CRM 1.0 is in CRM UAT.
But ERP 1.1 is due to come out in a week, so we need an ERP testing 1.1 environment. Since integration testing has to happen, the ERP 1.1 RC also needs a CRM 1.0 to talk to during integration testing (But that can't be the regular CRM UAT environment, since that's used for CRM production issues, not ERP 1.1 issues).
But wait.. CRM 1.1 is due out in a month. OK so we need a CRM 1.1 instance... but also an ERP 1.1 (or 1.0) instance so that we can integration test CRM 1.1. So far for just two systems, each with an upcoming version, we have (at least) the following environments:
ERP UAT
CRM UAT
ERP prod
CRM prod
CRM 1.1 release
ERP for the CRM 1.1 release
ERP 1.1 release
CRM for the ERP 1.1 release
Throw in a third, fourth, fifth system and you can see the factorial explosion of "required" environments.
If you work in a large-ish organisation with multiple suites, all in various develoment phases and all of which need to be tested in an integrated environment, how do you manage it? Surely people dont have N factorial integration testing instances for N application suites (plus, of course, all of the instances required prior to SIT). The company I work for seems to be saying that's what we need, and my reply of "hahaha you guys are funny this is a joke right?" doesn't seem to be enough to dissuade them.
March 4, 2012 at 8:49 pm
Hm, no takers? OK, let me rephrase:
If you use a booking/reservation/scheduling system for your various internal projects to use your limited supply of test servers (this would be my preferred approach), what booking software are you using?
Viewing 2 posts - 1 through 1 (of 1 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply