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LIGHTLY TECHNICAL OBSERVATIONS ON PEOPLESOFT, SQR, AND RELATED AND UNRELATED TOPICS

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Multiple Testing Environments

In last week's post (PeopleSoft support environments), I set out a simple suggestion for development and testing environments. Although it's typical to have only one development database for each PeopleSoft product line, there are commonly several testing environments arranged in two logical dimensions (steps along the migration path, and multiple ones at one step in the migration path). Today I'd like to talk about multiple testing environments at a single migration step.

There are many good reasons to have several testing environments. For example, you might want to refresh a separate environment from your production database in order to diagnose a particular data issue. Or there could be security/access considerations that lead you to maintain separate environments. There might be separate databases for training. You could even have a bull-in-a-china-shop type of tester who is best restricted to his or her own environment. The possible reasons are endless. However, the more testing environments you must maintain, the more time it takes to maintain them. And there is one important consideration that reveals a particularly bad reason to have a separate environment.

If a testing environment is to be truly representative of the current state of your systems, it must be patched with delivered updates and also must contain all of your customization. In other words, after you have developed a custom change in your DEV database, it should be migrated to all of the testing databases at the next migration step by default (in the absence of any particular reason not to migrate it).

This can lead to a particular annoying conflict. The issue is sometimes raised by project managers who want separate testing environments for their own projects. For example, the PM for Project A (a normal customization project, not an upgrade) might want a separate test database in order to exclude changes from Project B and/or normal system maintenance. I believe that this should be avoided whenever practical.

The PM will argue that his or her team members cannot test effectively if they are constantly hitting issues from Project B's customization. (The unspoken implication may be that since the PM does not control Project B, the developers on Project B cannot be trusted. The real issue may be that the PM is just worried about hitting milestones on schedule.)

Thoretically, Project B's changes should not intersect with Project A. (If they were expected to overlap, that's a different issue.) The PM for Project A says that since the two projects are completely unrelated, they should have separate testing databases.

OK, but if they are completely unrelated, why are we worried about keeping them separate? We should just use the same testing database for both. The PM could then argue that there is a possibility that [the incompetent fools at] Project B could inadvertently cause an issue for Project A. That's certainly possible. But then, isn't it good to know that the issue exists?

It often boils down to politics. The PM does not want anything "external" affecting the project schedule. But if we give a separate database to each project, the first time their separate code lines will meet is in production. That's a particularly bad place to run the merged code for the first time. It also may be very difficult to keep the code for the two projects separate—after all, they may both be making changes to the same objects.

Migrating custom changes only to certain testing databases makes the other databases out of date and inaccurate. Only a database that contains all custom changes truly reflects what production will look like. The purpose of testing is to find problems, not to avoid seeing them in the first place.

Now, if Project A is an upgrade or some other large-scale transformation of the entire system, we will need not only a separate database but also an entire separate string of environments. I'll touch on that next week.

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