World Quality Report 2022-2023: Test environments get cloud-ready but are not fully there yet

The methodologies for provisioning non-production environments (used for development and testing) have changed over the years as the influence of cloud grows stronger. At the same time, these non-production environments are still a long way from being fully on the cloud, as the latest World Quality Report (WQR) reveals. It notes that almost half of all organizations provision only up to 25% of their non-production environments on cloud.

This chapter of the WQR considers the different cloud provisioning strategies being adopted and what tools are being deployed for the automated provisioning that makes life easier – and more efficient – for quality engineering teams. From a hybrid cloud (44% of survey respondents) to a multi-cloud (38%) to a multi-premise (30%) strategy, there is clearly a mixed bag of approaches. This combi-model continues in the choice of tools, with 41% adopting a hybrid strategy of both commercial off-the-shelf tooling and open-source options.

Validating cloud environments and applications

Of course, it’s not just the provisioning of test environments that makes up the full quality assurance picture in today’s increasingly cloud-based world. Cloud testing in general, whereby organizations validate the scalability, performance, security, reliability, disaster recovery, interoperability, and multi-tenancy of their environments and applications on cloud, is also on the rise.  Some 96% of the WQR respondents now include cloud testing as part of the testing lifecycle, with 57% having included cloud testing for most projects.

While it is clear that cloud testing is very much part of the current quality assurance landscape, we see a distinct lack of maturity in defining cloud testing strategies for projects. This is evident in the 50% of respondents who said their cloud testing strategy was only ‘somewhat’ effective, and just 37% saying it was ‘moderately’ effective.

Recommendations for continued evolution

Breaking down the two aspects of this chapter (test environment management & provisioning and cloud testing), the WQR makes a number of recommendations for their ongoing transformation.

First, it urges the acceleration of multi-premise strategy adoption for test environments. It further recomends intelligent integration of commercial off-the-shelf and open source tooling, and promotes the efficient design and architecture of non-production environments to leverage the cost benefit of moving non-production workloads.

Second, with respect to cloud strategy, it recomends that all projects include a cloud and infrastructure strategy, not just cloud-migration projects or simply infrastructure related projects. Of course, as more data is hosted on cloud and the integrations with third party cloud applications increases, an important aspect of this cloud evolution is to strengthen the focus on security.

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