What is Test Environment Management?

A set of best practices to provide an effective, efficient and cost effective, end to end service for provisioning/building, supporting, maintaining, re-using, allocating and managing Software Test, Development and Pre-Production Environments or Software Test Beds.

A Software Test, Development or Pre-Production Environment could consist of a client server application, Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), Middle Ware, Interfaces, Daemons, Customised processes (written in any software programming language), FTP Utilities etc used across functional test phases such as Unit, Integration, Acceptance, all manner of performance or non functional testing and development phases, all require environments.

Test Environment Management (TEM) should contribute to the business case stage of any software project, providing a cost estimate on resources and timeline required to create, provision, build, support/maintain test, development and pre-production environments for the project.