Planning and Managing Complex Test Resource Logistics

Subtle but catastrophic bugs, such as those that cause server crashes and database record-lock race conditions, often only reveal themselves during performance, stress, volume, data quality, and reliability testing. Such testing is most effectively performed in test environments-hardware, software, network, and release configurations-that mimic as nearly as possible the field environment, because test results in less-complex settings often do not extrapolate due to the non-linearity of software. In complex settings, such as Web and e-commerce server and database farms, managing these lab configurations can be quite challenging. This paper presents a basic Access database, designed using the Entity-Relationship technique, that will allow the Test Manager to plan, configure, and maintain this test environment through the test project.