Release Management Process and Best Practices for Testers

The release management life cycle is an important work-flow which every testers needs to understand for an efficient and an effective environment setup. Test-bed/Test environment is defined as the workspace in which the AUT is deployed for testing. 

Below are a set of steps that need to be followed sequentially to make the test environment fit for testing.

i. Test environment refresh (Refresh from Production or other mirrors) – Typically this refresh can be either incremental or complete. This would result in erasing the current data in the test environment and populating the same with latest production code. In case of refresh all test data in the test environment would be erased.

ii. Static Data setup – All static data in the test environment can either be setup manually or the environment can be refreshed only for static data flash. An automatic static data refresh would copy all static data from production tables to the test environment.

NOTE: In certain cases, both environment refresh and static data setup can be performed with a single refresh request.

iii. Test data setup – All the test data that needs to be either created or pumped into the test environment from production needs to performed before a new build is deployed into the test environment. Usually, test data setup activity is performed after a complete refresh.

iv. Build Request – The build and configuration team would be responsible for creating the test build.

v. Build Release – Once the build is ready, a separate request needs to be placed for the build to be deployed into the test environment.

vi. Request for any external interfaces – If in case there are any external interface requirement, this needs to be raised to the environment support team would be able to link these interfaces with the test environment.

Once the build is deployed, sanity checks are performed to check the fitness of the build. Depending on the build acceptance criteria, the build is passed for testing.

When ever a new build is released, the release management team would be involved in preparing the release notes which would be the basis for the tester to understand what modules are present in the build that would be tested. 

These release notes are extremely helpful in case of iterative development models in which several iterations of the application is deployed over a period of time.