There is a collective frustration related to flight delays that resonates through many individual tales involving missed connections, sleeping at airports or lost luggage. The frustration is often compounded by the additional consequences of a delay: stalled holiday plans, missed meetings and money wasted — not to mention the sometimes ill-informed airline staff and fellow travelers who are all vying for the next available flight, both of which only add to the tension.

Whatever the consequences for people on a single affected plane, imagine the difficulties and costs for an airport if the delays affect all services in and out for a full day — or even just an hour.

Many of us can picture the chaos caused by delayed planes, but the same feeling can be found in the technology world with the delivery life cycle of software and applications. The complexity that a development team at a large organization can feel is like air traffic control in a large airport. Wrestling with ensuring a clear path through release schedules, environment allocations, configurations and test activities takes many people, lots of resources and wastes huge amounts of time.

Often the last priority — but a big factor leading to delays in software releases — is poor management of complex enterprise test environments. Close to the end of the delivery cycle, this can be where development work goes to sit and wait (sometimes for far too long) before it is put through its paces to ensure that the end result works as intended. This is a vital part of the development life cycle and can be the difference between creating an amazing update to an application and sending end users a bug-filled piece of software.

Test Environments: Last But Definitely Not Least

As you would assume, the larger the organization, the larger the development team, the more software releases. Take Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, which handles over 100 million passengers yearly. Much like this airport, more release traffic means more complexity and complications to ensure that there are no delays.

With more software releases come the need for more test environments, and these environments have become a choke point in the application delivery cycle, resulting in project delays. Worse still, confusion and frustrations about delays can result in a false sense of security with an application tested against a misconfigured environment.

Those tasked with managing what can become hundreds of test environments are faced with many challenges, including: