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Introducing untested applications into your environment can prove disastrous, however several companies continue to deploy mission critical applications without testing. View pre-deployment as reassurance that your mission critical applications will work properly in the production environment.

Pre-deployment myths
One of the biggest myths of pre-deployment testing is the upfront time it takes. As with your automobile and house, you purchase insurance in the off chance something may happen (e.g., car accident, fire).

Pre-deployment testing can help:

• Reduce slowdowns and outages
• Discover possible data corruption
• Ensure mission critical applications play together
• Realize possible scalability issues

Some companies cite the financial investment as a deterrent to pre-deployment testing. Any interruption in the production environment typically results in a direct loss of dollars and time. The bottom line is that companies don’t want to introduce untested or unknowns into their production environment.

Companies that use load generators and a quality modeling tool don’t have to spend millions of dollars on hardware for testing.

Stages associated with pre-deployment testing
Many companies have separate environments for development, testing, ready and production. Typically, applications are developed in the development environment, as you might guess.

The test environment is used to work out bugs in the software, determine the optimal configuration on which to launch the new application, and identify any compatibility issues.

The ready environment is typically used to test any scalability issues and other bugs or issues before being released to production.

Once all issues have been tested and all conceivable issues resolved, the software is released to the production environment.

Issues associated with the processes
One issue with the aforementioned processes is the ability to test on a duplicate production environment. Many companies cannot afford to spend millions of dollars to duplicating their production environment just for pre-deployment testing.

Scalability is also a concern as it is difficult to duplicate the volume of a production environment in many test environments.

Due to the expense of duplicating a production environment and the difficulty in generating sufficient workload volume for testing, companies are turning to load generators and modeling tools. Load generators represent the volume of end users (customers), and modeling tools are used to predict the growth and affects of different hardware.

This process can save a company millions of dollars in hardware and can reduce the time and effort for testing.

Create less hardship
The key to pre-deployment testing success is the ability to represent your production environment and resolve any issues before it goes into production.

Click here for more information on how to address pre-deployment testing.