Importance of parallel test environments
My job for my current project is to do performance testing on the application my team has developed. The problem is that the client only has a single test environment; and it is being used for client QA testing. This means that we have to be careful with how we use it. We can’t simply launch a full stress test that may crash the server.
One thing this has taught me is the importance of having several, fully integrated test environments. One environment for the client to use for testing and one for the developers. What has made this project so difficult is that the app relies on a lot of web services and XML calls that are all part of the testing and need to be duplicated in the two test environments.
The other thing this project is quickly showing me is that web services and XML is slow, really slow.
yes, i’ve experienced the same thing as you, since I just completed performance testing. although I ran into a different situation where we shared a load balancer with production lol. But parallel environments are quite expensive. especially if the qa environment is a parallel of production already and you need one for staging or performance testing. I think the way to go is a virtualized environment for QA, and a staging environment that is the same specs/design as production for doing all the fun stuff. that way it does not interfere with QA trying to finish their testing cycles, and gives you a good idea how it will be like when it is deployed on production like hardware.
yea, i was also surprised at how slow webservices were when I was querying large datasets, but maybe i wasnt really doing it very smart in how i requested the information lol =p