Building a test environment requires caution! What points should be paid attention to before and after building it？

Test Environment = Software + Hardware + Network + Data Preparation + Test Tools

In simple terms, a well-planned and managed test environment can minimize the adverse effects of environmental changes on testing work, and can also have a positive effect on improving the efficiency and quality of testing work.

What points should be paid attention to before and after building the test environment?

Determine the purpose of the test before building the test environment

Building a test environment requires caution! What points should be paid attention to before and after building it？

That isFunctional Testing, the stability test, or the performance test, the purpose of the test is different, and the points to pay attention to when building the test environment are also different. For example, if you need to perform functional testing, then we do not need a large amount of data, but need a high coverage rate, and the test data requirements should be as real as possible. This does not require too strict requirements for the hardware environment configuration. To improve the coverage rate, it is necessary to configure different hardware environments. If you need to perform performance testing, a large amount of data is required, and the test data should be as close as possible to the actual data distribution. At this time, it may be necessary to use a large number of devices to apply pressure to the test object, and it is necessary to prepare a large number of devices in advance.

When testing in a test environment, it is as realistic as possible

This requirement is very high for testers because many testers have not been to the user's site. It is impossible to completely simulate the user's environment. At this time, we should understand the user's environment through technical support personnel and sales staff, try to simulate the user's environment, select appropriate operating systems and software platforms, understand the minimum requirements for the operation of the test software and the hardware configuration used by users, understand the commonly used software by users, and avoid testing under all configurations and all operating systems, without a focus, wasting time.

This can, on the one hand, ensure compatibility between the software product and other collaborative products during the testing process, avoiding problems discovered after the software is released to users; on the other hand, it can also be used to verify whether the product is what users truly need. In most cases, testing environments are vacuum environments, completely pure platforms. During testing, there are no problems, but once they are taken to the field, with other software and hardware configurations, there are many problems, which is the lack of consideration of the user's environment when setting up the testing environment.

Ensure a virus-free environment

I have tested several projects, and they were all infected by the testing environment, leading to frequent crashes and failure to run of the test software, resulting in the interruption of testing. Antivirus software is necessary, but the time for antivirus should also be controlled. Specifically, you can follow the following steps: select a PC -> install the operating system -> install antivirus software and scan for viruses -> install drivers and commonly used software and browsers -> scan for viruses -> install test software -> scan for viruses. After installing the test software, pay attention to the possibility that if we are not using genuine antivirus software, some files of the installed test software may be considered as suspicious files or viruses and cleared, resulting in the test software becoming directly unusable.

Ensure that the antivirus software is genuine. If it is not genuine, it is recommended to uninstall the antivirus software before installing test software. During the testing process, pay attention to the use of USB flash drives and the control of the testing environment and the external network. Before using a USB flash drive, it should be scanned for viruses on other machines first; when the testing environment is connected to the external network, it is not recommended to use shared access to test machines. When a small range of PC machines are isolated from the outside world to create a testing environment, the use of portable storage devices can be disabled, and only one PC can be allowed to use it. On this PC, install antivirus software, and when transferring data, copy it to this machine first and then transfer it via shared access. These measures can effectively prevent virus infection of the testing environment and ensure a virus-free environment.

Create an independent testing environment

During the testing process, we must ensure that our testing environment is independent to avoid the environment being occupied, which may affect the progress and results of the testing. For example, after the equipment is connected to the network, whether other testing groups are also using it, which may affect our testing results. Sometimes, developers may use our testing environment to determine the problem, which may disrupt our testing activities and, more seriously, affect the progress of the testing. To avoid this situation, testers should provide detailed steps to reproduce the defect and as much information as possible when submitting a defect report. Let the developers reproduce and locate the problem based on the defect report.

Build a reusable test environment

Before we set up the test environment, install the test software, and during the test process, it is necessary to back up the operating system and test environment. In this way, it can help us directly restore the test environment for the next round of testing, avoiding the time spent on rebuilding the test environment, and on the other hand, when the test environment is damaged, it can restore the test environment, avoiding the loss of test data and reproducing the problem. Building a reusable test environment often requires the use of disk backup tools such as ghost, Drive Image, etc.; these tools mainly implement the backup and restore functions of disk files; before using these tools, we must first do the following necessary preparatory work:

A. Ensure the quality and reliability of the disk backup tool software used, and it is recommended to use genuine software;

B. Use effective genuine antivirus software to detect the disk to be backed up, ensuring that there are no viruses in the test environment;

C. During the backup process in the test, in order to reduce the volume of the image files, all files under the Temp folder should be deleted, and the Win386.swp file or the _RESTORE folder should be deleted, so that the C drive will not become excessively bloated. Choosing to create image files in a compressed manner can greatly reduce the amount of data to be backed up;

D. Finally, perform a thorough disk defragmentation again, and adjust the C drive to the optimal state.

For the newly installed operating system and drivers, backup work should also be carried out before the installation of the test program, so as to prevent direct recovery when using the same operating system during the cross-project implementation.

After completing these preparatory work, we can use backup tools to create disk image files of various combination types of test environments one by one. For the various image files that have been created, they should be set to system, hidden, and read-only attributes, so that on the one hand, it can prevent accidental deletion and virus infection; on the other hand, it can avoid frequent movement of the image files when defragmenting the disk, thus saving time for disk defragmentation; at the same time, it is also necessary to record the applicable scope of each image file, the information of the backed up files, and so on.

The construction and maintenance of the test environment is in an important position, its quality directly affects the authenticity and accuracy of the test results. Maintaining the test environment requires a lot of energy, which cannot be completed by one person alone, and we all need to cooperate actively.