Role of the Environment Manager

One area that I have regularly come across which needs further clarification is the role of the Test Environment Manager. I have produced this article for those people looking to understand what exactly should be expected of an Environment Manager and could be used as the basis for a job description or role profile.

Test Environments are required in order to enable the test execution to occur. The Test Environment Manager is responsible for the provision of the test environment, its configuration status, its stability and maintenance. They also provide administrative activities such as backups and purging on request of the project, monitor usage of environments, supplying support throughout the test execution, including out of hours working if required. They will be expected to manage change to the test environments and keep the programme and testing informed of status. They must be able to give advance warning of downtime of any component of the test environment, which may cover multiple platforms. Duties are predominantly based around the organisation’s infrastructure but can extend to cover interfacing with 3rd party organisations which are offering equipment to form part of the project environment.

The environment manager is responsible for ensuring the provision of suitable test environments for all aspects of the testing of the core system. A suitable test environment is one that meets the requirements for the phase of testing and those requirements will be documented and provided to the Environment Manager by the Test Manager.

They shall ensure that the interfacing systems test environments are available and of a known and controlled configuration. For the core system, the environment should be available two weeks prior to test execution commencement, so giving time for any difficulties to be resolved. The environment must remain available for the duration of the project. As many peripheral systems should be delivered on similar timescales.

Thought must be given to the possibility of different environments being required, where phases of testing overlap, or where the requirements of the testing phase are such that the provided environment needs to be changed or upgraded. Each time a new environment is made available, this should also occur two weeks prior to test execution occurring in the new environment. The Environments will be placed under change control and will always be of a known state of configuration.

No upgrade of hardware or software may occur to a test environment without the approval of the Environment Manager. The Environment Manager must place change control over the environments and maintain that level of control. This may be a formalised mechanism, but as a minimum, requires that the Environment Managers approval has been received prior to the change occurring. All changes must be communicated to the following people as a minimum:

1. Development Manager
2. Testing Manager
3. UAT Manager
4. Project Manager

It is expected that this list will grow as time passes and the individual users of the system become known. It is felt that the above will form a minimum conduit for such communications until such time as all individuals are known.

A record of the configuration should be maintained for each environment or element of an environment if multiple environments are required in order to make a whole. The record should detail the hardware build that has been provided by Technical Operations, including versions of operating systems and other utilities provided as part of the basic provision. Over and above this, each item of software placed onto the environment for test, shall have its version recorded, so enabling a clear picture of the configuration at any given time. Any change to any aspect of the configuration should be approved under the change control mechanism and logged in the Configuration Record.

Should the software under test be configurable, a document with its own version control shall be supplied to the Environment Manager so that they can use this as a state of software configuration. If changes are required to that configuration, these should be recorded in an upgraded version of the document and the Configuration Record updated to reflect that this has happened.

Ad hoc changes to the configuration, be that hardware, software or software configuration, are not permissible. Alteration to the configuration must be controlled and the configuration must always be maintained in a known and managed state.

The Environment manager, will ensure that there is support for the system during all times of test execution, be this late at night or over weekends and bank holidays. They will make known a list of all the different elements of the environments and the contact names and numbers of the people that they support.

A plan shall be maintained by the environment manager of who is using what environment for what purpose at what time. This needs to be maintained so as to ensure that changes in environment usage are managed and controlled and so that if multiple environments are required, this can be kept to a minimum by the intelligent employment of the environment resources available.

The Environment Manager, as a result of the change control mechanism, will be able to notify the users of the test environments of any outages. These changes shall be recorded in an outage log, so that upon project completion, the details of outages can be formally reported. It will also enable monitoring of any problems that may occur in this area and be used to aid resolution of repetitive issues.

As part of the standard weekly output, the environment manager will distribute the following information.

1. Planned usage for the week.
2. Planned outages for the week.
3. Planned changes for the week.
4. The statement of configuration for each environment.
5. Planned Backups

The last item on the list is backups. These shall be available to all testers upon request and shall be recorded and requested by the Environment Manager.

I hope that this is found to be useful and informative.