Environments in Software Design

Did you know that testing cars are a lot like the best practices in testing software?

Much like car manufacturers go through rigorous tests before they deliver their cars to customers, we too in the software development industry have different stages wherein we make sure that the app of our clients is operating perfectly. We call these different stages: Environments.

We have the development environment where features are incrementally added and tested by developers. Once passed, developers hand the build off to quality assurance to be checked in the Testing Environment. Here they perform testing activities to detect all possible defects or faults related to the added feature. After this, we move on to the Staging Environment to simulate all possible user behaviors and use real data to see how the application behaves. Similar to crash testing in cars, we want to know how our software fares in extreme circumstances.

Finally, once the car or the software is done through these testing environments it is now ready to be used in production. Are you testing your software like how you test cars? Are you making sure that the personal data of your software users are protected? Have you tested if the security of your applications is impenetrable? Are you confident that users will be able to use your app as planned without issues? If any of your answers in the questions above are no, then you might want to revisit how you test your software.

At White Cloak, we test our software the way car manufacturers do, like our users’ lives depend on it.