Introducing Automated Environment Configuration Testing in an Industrial Setting

This paper presents an automated environment configuration testing strategy developed as part of an action research project to deal with issues of staging environment instability in a large organization. We demonstrate how a suite of automated environment configuration tests provided an unobtrusive way to verify the hospitability of staging environments, decreased the time wasted on manual troubleshooting of environmental issues, and consolidated software configuration management information. The test strategy was also greatly welcomed by upper-level management and is now being expanded to other parts of the organization.