Test Environment: Best Practices When Setting Up

You’ve written all of your test cases! Congrats, you’re on the right track to success. Now you need to execute them, and test execution needs to take place in a test environment.
 

Those environments can be the make-or-break of your test result. In this article, we’ll explore the concept of a test environment in-depth and how you can best set it up.

What is a Test Environment?

Test environment offered in Katalon Studio

Imagine you’ve just created this new, high-tech robot (your software). Now, would you release it into the world without testing how it behaves in different conditions—like how it handles speed, responds to commands, or deals with obstacles? Of course not.
 

This is where the test environment comes in.
 

A test environment is a carefully designed setup that mimics real-world conditions where your software will operate. It includes everything the software needs to run, like hardware, software, network configurations, and crucially, test data that replicates actual scenarios the software will encounter.
 

You’re essentially putting your software through its paces in a controlled, risk-free space to ensure it can perform perfectly once it hits the production stage (the real world).
 

Examples of Test Environment

Let’s say you are testing the login page of a personal finance SaaS website. You’d need:

• Operating System (OS): Windows 10, macOS Catalina
• Browser: Chrome (latest version), Edge, Firefox, Safari
• Database: MySQL 8.0 or PostgreSQL 13 (matching the production setup)
• Middleware: Apache Tomcat 9 or Nginx 1.18
• Test Automation Tool: Selenium WebDriver

If you also want to test on mobiles, consider mobile environments:

Devices:

• iPhone 14 Pro (iOS 17)
• Samsung Galaxy S23 (Android 13)
• Google Pixel 7 (Android 13)

Mobile Browsers:

• Safari (iOS)
• Chrome Mobile (Android/iOS)
• Samsung Internet Browser (Android)

Learn more: How To Do Mobile Testing?

Importance of Test Environment

1. Controlled Space for Testing: Provides a risk-free environment to mimic real-world conditions, ensuring that software performs as expected before it goes live.
2. Early Bug Detection: Helps catch issues early in development, reducing the cost and complexity of fixing bugs later in the software lifecycle​
3. Safe Experimentation: Allows developers and testers to try new features or updates without affecting the actual system or users, minimizing downtime risks​
4. Prevents New Issues: Ensures that any updates or changes don’t introduce new bugs, maintaining the integrity of the software

Types of Test Environment

1. Development Environment

This is where developers write and test their code before handing it off to testers. It typically includes a basic setup with the necessary tools and libraries for coding, as well as minimal configuration for testing small units of the application. This environment allows developers to work independently and perform unit tests to check the functionality of individual components.

2. Integration Testing Environment

As software becomes more complex, it consists of multiple modules or services. The integration testing environment is designed to bring these pieces together and test them as a whole. It ensures that different software modules—like front-end and back-end systems, databases, and external APIs—work seamlessly together.

Learn more on how to do API testing:

3. System Testing Environment

In this environment, the entire application is tested as a fully integrated system. The aim is to validate the end-to-end functionality of the software and ensure that all components work together as expected.

4. User Acceptance Testing (UAT) Environment

This environment is designed to resemble the production setting as closely as possible. UAT focuses on ensuring the software meets business requirements and is ready for deployment. In this environment, end-users or stakeholders conduct tests to validate that the system performs all the intended tasks and solves their business needs.

5. Performance Testing Environment

This environment is specifically designed to assess how the software performs under various conditions, including heavy traffic, high loads, or extended use.
 

Key Components of a Test Environment

A test environment consists of 2 primary parts: the hardware and the software. This is why a setting up test environment is also known as setting up hardware - software configuration in the software testing life cycle.

1. Hardware

Hardware is the backbone that supports everything else. After all, without hardware, the software has nowhere to run on. Here we’re talking about the physical resources that run the software during the testing process. Some of the popular components of the hardware part are:

• Servers
  • Physical server: these are dedicated machines that offer the highest level of realism. You use them only for high-performance applications or when you want to test server-specific scenarios, since it takes up considerable resources to invest in and maintain them.
  • Virtual server: these are easier to manage, more scalable, and can simulate a much more diverse range of environments at a lower cost compared to the former option. Most common virtual machines are hosted on cloud services like AWS or Azure.
• Test device: you would need to also buy the test device to run your application on. if you want to test your app on iOS, you would need to buy all versions of the iPhone to test on (going back to the earlier versions of iPhone 5 or iPhone 6). Considering the vast diversity of mobile devices, tablets, laptops available on the current market, this would be quite a challenge. Instead, you can leverage device farms (physical or virtual) to gain access to devices with differing configurations (screen size, processing power, etc.)

2. Software

If the hardware creates the basis of your test environment then the software creates the conditions under which your application is tested.

• Operating system: this is the foundation on which the application (and all of its dependencies) are run. The OS must 100% replicate the production OS to catch OS-specific bugs or performance issues.
• Database: this is where user data, configuration details, and other critical information your software needs is stored. In a test environment, you can replicate your production database structure; however, it is recommended that you use anonymized or synthetic test data to stay compliant with data security requirements. Learn more about test data management to understand how to achieve this.
• Middleware: middleware software sits between the operating system and the applications to manage communication and data exchange. Examples include Apache Tomcat, Nginx, or Node.js.
• Application software: this is just the very application you are testing. Make sure that your test environment has access to the different versions of your software so that teams can perform regression tests more easily.

3. Testing tools and frameworks

If you are doing manual testing, you’d still need to have a bug tracking system/test management system installed in the environment to capture your test results. If your approach is automation testing, you need to have your automation testing tools and frameworks ready to go.
 

Selenium and Playwright are all relatively popular frameworks for web automation testing. For test authoring, management, execution, and reporting capabilities, you can leverage tools like Katalon. 
 

4. CI/CD tools

CI/CD tools automatically deploy the latest builds of the software into the test environment and run automated tests on every commit. The benefit? This pipeline speeds up the testing process so that bugs are caught early, which allows the team to release software more frequently.
 

Read More: A list of 14 common CI/CD tools
 

How To Set Up Test Environments

1. Designing the Test Environment

In this phase, the objective is to carefully design a test environment that mirrors the production environment as closely as possible. You should consider these key factors:

1. Backup and Archiving Requirements: Determine if the test environment requires backup mechanisms in case of failure, especially for large datasets and long-running tests.
2. Network Configuration Verification: Ensure that the network setup (firewalls, routers, load balancers) mimics the production environment. Any latency, bandwidth, or security-related factors that could affect testing must be addressed.
3. Server Operating System, Databases, and Other Components: Identify the OS (e.g., Linux, Windows), databases (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL), and middleware (e.g., Apache Tomcat) that will be required for the environment.
4. Licensing Requirements: Determine the number of software licenses required and ensure that the test team has access to all necessary licenses to avoid delays.

2. Setting Up the Environment

Once the design phase is complete, the actual setup of the test environment begins. This step involves translating the design requirements into a working system:

• Analyze Setup Requirements: Prepare a detailed list of both software (OS, databases, test tools, application builds) and hardware (servers, storage, network devices) necessary for the test environment.
• Obtain Official Approval: Before proceeding with setup, get official confirmation from stakeholders, project managers, or administrators to allocate the required resources.
• Configuration and Access: Once approved, configure the environment based on the design specifications. Set up virtual or physical servers, ensure proper connectivity, and provide access credentials to the QA team and other stakeholders.

3. Smoke Testing

After the environment is fully configured, a round of smoke testing is crucial to validate its stability:

• Initial Validation: Perform a basic set of tests to ensure that the environment is set up correctly and that key functionality works. Smoke tests should focus on core functionalities, such as verifying that servers are reachable, databases are responding, and basic application features are operational.
• Outcome-based Actions: If the smoke tests are successful, the environment is deemed stable, and the QA team can proceed with more detailed testing. If issues arise, they should be documented and shared with the development or infrastructure teams to fix the problems before further testing continues.