{"id":591,"date":"2020-02-24T21:22:37","date_gmt":"2020-02-24T21:22:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jackofalltradesmasterofsome.com\/blog\/?p=591"},"modified":"2020-02-24T21:22:39","modified_gmt":"2020-02-24T21:22:39","slug":"consulting-project-phases-environments-unit-testing-and-releasing-to-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jackofalltradesmasterofsome.com\/blog\/2020\/02\/24\/consulting-project-phases-environments-unit-testing-and-releasing-to-test\/","title":{"rendered":"Consulting Project Phases – Environments, Unit Testing and Releasing to Test"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Environments, Unit Testing and Releasing to Test<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This section applies more to technical and functional\nprojects. Work usually takes place in four major environments: local,\ndevelopment, test and production. The local environment is all the work that\nhappens on your laptop. It is isolated to the processors and hard drive you are\nworking on. You won\u2019t have any fears of screwing anything else up for anyone since\nyou are local, but the code and data you are working with will grow stale and\nmake it harder to have a clearer picture of what you are trying to align your\nwork to when you are testing. Local environments are not always necessary if\nthere is a good development environment. This environment is usually shared\namongst other consultants and developers, so you may run the risk of stepping\non each other\u2019s toes even if you have a solid source control strategy in place.\nThis environment is a safe sandbox for you to create new objects or alter existing\nones. Business users will never be working with anything in this environment\nand it will be the most unstable due to the untested elements being worked on\nor developed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you create and develop your items in the development\nenvironment, the first phase of testing will take place. This is called unit\ntesting and is done by the consultant or developers. Here is where you hand\ntest the functionality against the definitions outlined in the requirements.\nYou may not have the best data or stable code to work with, but you will be in\ncharge of the first smoke test to be sure things are working the way you\ndesigned them to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once unit testing is completed, code is then moved to the\ntest environment. Code should be deployed or transitioned to the test environment\nexactly how it would be to the production environment later on. Testing the\ndeployment process is just one more test you will need to perform in addition\nto the functionally of the code going over. The test environment should be as\nclose of a mirror to production as possible. The size, speed, tools and data\nmust be copied over or replicated after every major release to be sure your\ndress rehearsal is as close as possible to the main show. If all goes well\nduring the testing phase, your code will be ready for go live! The production\nenvironment will be the actual systems the business users will use day to day\nand is considered an active part of operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are you interested in starting a career in consulting? Be\nsure to read the full book Jack of all Trades Master of Some; An Introduction to\nConsulting<\/a> available on Amazon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":603,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book","category-consulting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofalltradesmasterofsome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofalltradesmasterofsome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofalltradesmasterofsome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofalltradesmasterofsome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofalltradesmasterofsome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jackofalltradesmasterofsome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":592,"href":"https:\/\/jackofalltradesmasterofsome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591\/revisions\/592"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofalltradesmasterofsome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofalltradesmasterofsome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofalltradesmasterofsome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofalltradesmasterofsome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}