Environments, Unit Testing and Releasing to Test
This section applies more to technical and functional projects. Work usually takes place in four major environments: local, development, test and production. The local environment is all the work that happens on your laptop. It is isolated to the processors and hard drive you are working on. You won’t have any fears of screwing anything else up for anyone since you are local, but the code and data you are working with will grow stale and make it harder to have a clearer picture of what you are trying to align your work to when you are testing. Local environments are not always necessary if there is a good development environment. This environment is usually shared amongst other consultants and developers, so you may run the risk of stepping on each other’s toes even if you have a solid source control strategy in place. This environment is a safe sandbox for you to create new objects or alter existing ones. Business users will never be working with anything in this environment and it will be the most unstable due to the untested elements being worked on or developed.
As you create and develop your items in the development environment, the first phase of testing will take place. This is called unit testing and is done by the consultant or developers. Here is where you hand test the functionality against the definitions outlined in the requirements. You may not have the best data or stable code to work with, but you will be in charge of the first smoke test to be sure things are working the way you designed them to.
Once unit testing is completed, code is then moved to the test environment. Code should be deployed or transitioned to the test environment exactly how it would be to the production environment later on. Testing the deployment process is just one more test you will need to perform in addition to the functionally of the code going over. The test environment should be as close of a mirror to production as possible. The size, speed, tools and data must be copied over or replicated after every major release to be sure your dress rehearsal is as close as possible to the main show. If all goes well during the testing phase, your code will be ready for go live! The production environment will be the actual systems the business users will use day to day and is considered an active part of operations.
In larger organizations and projects, you may have multiple versions of development and test environments for redundancy, scale or just so that you can separate different teams and functions. Be sure to keep a cheat sheet of what goes where as you do not want to be moving code and component over to the wrong area accidentally!
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