Hi,

I am putting together a business case for convincing my boss to purchase a test environment for our WebFocus applications. Currently we are running 7.6.10 but I would like to upgrade to 7.7 very soon and eventually 8. Our sales team's official recommendation is to install a test environment to perform the upgrade first.

The applications we've developed in WF so far are not mission critical yet..so an interruption in our production environment wouldn't cause too much commotion. However, the plan is for that to change and many more apps will be created in WF this year.

Can you all send me a few tips on what the overall benefits of maintaining a test environment in WF would be? I have alot of ideas and 'gut' feelings but I need to put this in to an organized proposal.

Thanks!
Jeralee

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kerry,

Well, you have covered one already, upgrade testing.

Another example, that I have personally experienced, is having a process do something unsocialble, and cause the server major problems. The production reports slowed, and then returned errors.

What they were effectively doing was developing in production, the biggest No No there is.

Many shops that I have experience with have three environments. Development, QA/Test and Production. Development can in that situation be done completely separate. You can do pretty much whatever you like on development, including crashing servers, restarting/rebooting etc etc without bothering anyone else.
For QA/Test it is very handy to have and maintain a reproducable environment. After all, if you test today, you would probably want to have the same results tomorrow. And that is not necessarily the case on either one of the other environments. On QA/Test no development is done, not even correcting development mistakes. The data is most preferably a static set.
And when everything is tested OK, the app(s) will be copied/deployed to production. On production you can only use the app(s), not modify them, but the data will be the live data.

Hope this helps ...

Thank you for the replies!

I am also making a case with upper management for a test environment. Trying to keep the budget down, so I can get
approval. Any recommendations for critical pieces to bring up in the test environment. We are planning to use CAS
Certification for log in and are worried about any java issues that arise primarily.