Delayed access to production-like test environments stands in the way of proactive and accurate tests. Let’s automate that.
With Torque’s drag-and-drop graphical UI, users can create reusable templates (called “blueprints”) for complex, hybrid environments that can accurately model production instances, preventing defects from escaping into production
With on-demand, self-service access to production-like environments, QA teams aren’t stuck waiting for IT to provision resources. QA teams can spin up the infrastructure they need to do continuous testing with multiple permutations, ensuring fewer escape defects… all without slowing down release cycles.
“Always on” static environments are expensive to maintain and difficult to track. Changes often go unnoticed, undocumented, or over-written as multiple teams share environments. With Torque, teams can spin up—and automatically tear down—test environments for specific tasks and schedule and reserve shared resources to avoid teams stepping on each other.
With Torque, QA engineers can track who set up which environments and for what purpose. Users can track which operations were performed on specific resources, giving testers complete, end-to-end traceability to identify root causes of defects.
Accurate tests rely on test environments that represent the actual target infrastructure, data, software, and devices in use. But building those environments manually requires a wide range of expertise and long wait times. With Torque, specialists create and approve the inventory of environment resources, applications, and templates. Users can access the environments they are entitled to use and edit custom inputs without having to know details of the application or script.
Amdocs, a $4B+ software and services provider, has developed a complete DevSecOps approach to continuous testing built on Quali's Environment-as-a-Service platform. With a focus on helping customers accelerate their migration to the cloud, Amdocs Quality Engineering services combines its vast quality engineering expertise with the power of Quali’s technology to help global enterprises embrace a “shift-left” approach to testing and release better products to market faster.
To get the most out of Torque, we've compiled some of most common questions, articles and topics from our Community. Check it out to learn more.
Every testing activity consists of two parts: setting up and preparing a test environment and executing the test itself. Many test teams start by automating tests on static test environments. The downside of this approach is that it’s very difficult to control the configuration in a static environment, especially if it’s shared by multiple team members or tests. This causes conflicts and misconfigurations that result in failed tests. When automated tests incur a high failure rate, the team spends a lot of time on troubleshooting only to discover that the reason for failure was the environment configuration or data. As a result, they stop trusting automated testing. You can ensure your test automation efforts don’t go to waste by automating environment configuration before running your tests.
Every software test requires a test environment with all the application components and data required to run the test. Often, multiple team members will share environments for running tests and automated tests. Static environments typically remain up continuously. While using a static environment minimizes the amount of time spent on setup, the environment is prone to configuration creep when various team members introduce changes. Using a static environment also results in testing conflicts, making it harder to reach high automation levels. Dynamic environments are achieved by automating the environment setup process. Investing in dynamic environments is worthwhile for any team that plans to automate testing. Using dynamic environments ensures consistency in the environment configuration and data, making it easier to reproduce issues and support multiple testing activities (including performance, security, disaster recovery, and more). It also makes it easier to integrate test activities in the CI/CD process.
Yes! In most cases, setting up and configuring the test environment and test data takes significant time and resources. Automating test environments helps save time regardless of whether the testing is manual or automated. Manual testers gain one-click access to test environments with the confidence that they’re configured correctly. If automating tests is a goal, environment automation creates the perfect foundation.
In a traditional waterfall model, software testing is performed after the developers finish coding and before the release goes to production. This approach works for long development cycles, but with the pressure to release software faster, the cycles shorten, and testing becomes a painful bottleneck. To avoid a long testing stage, testing needs to occur in all stages of the software development lifecycle. This concept is also called “continuous testing.” Achieving continuous testing requires a high level of automation, including test environment and automated tests.
Yes! Quali can make it easy to gradually move testing activities to the public cloud without worrying about public cloud expertise, unexpected costs, or visibility into your cloud usage. Setting up your test environment through public cloud providers like AWS and Azure is straightforward and allows you to reap the benefits of automation quickly while providing a seamless experience for test engineers.
Test environment automation is the perfect foundation for automating test activities. Selecting the right platform is an important step. In addition to automating the setup of test environments, consider the critical aspects of environment automation, including automated de-commissioning of test environments, automation re-usability (make sure to create building blocks and not scripts!), a self-service interface, automatic tagging of resources, reporting and analytics, and integration with your testing and CI/CD ecosystem. With a purpose-built platform, you’ll save time and eliminate costly errors.
Shifting left means testing earlier and discovering issues before they become difficult and expensive to fix. Test environment automation allows users quick access to consistent, production-like environments with the right configuration and data. Automating this process provides multiple stakeholders access to environments at any stage of the software development lifecycle, empowering engineers to test earlier—an important enabler for shifting left.
Shifting right means testing during production. This is an important part of continuous testing. Shifting right is not always easy—some tests (especially non-functional and security tests) should not run in the production environment. Test environment automation delivers one-click access to production-like environments, reproducing issues in the safe confines of a test environment.
Any test environment can be automated. Unlike test automation, test environment automation can be reusable. Usually, the components needed in a test environment are similar for most of your tests—from functional tests to non-functional and security tests. Quali’s environment building blocks make it easy to reuse existing assets for any test activity, making your environment automation efforts robust and future-proof.
