Chapter 10 -- Testing and the Production Channel

Chapter 10

About This Chapter

After a project begins, it is important for the developers to have the appropriate working environment. This chapter begins by explaining how to build a working environment that supports development, testing, certification, and production. We refer to this life cycle as the production channel, and we describe it using real-life examples. We explain the goals of the production channel, which are to provide appropriate application testing within a controlled environment while protecting the production environment of the organization from unnecessary interruption.

We also look in greater detail at testing, and we recommend several ways to execute and monitor tests. Then we discuss ways to scale out an application's production environment by adding servers to the physical implementation.

Finally, we examine ways to classify program faults and failures, discuss the larger issue of product bugs, and describe methods of tracking, classifying, and resolving known bug problems.

The principles and guidelines we provide in this chapter are based on our own experience with the creation of application architectures and the implementation of modern applications, together with the following sources:

• Microsoft Solutions Framework
• The MSF Principles of Application Development course # 1516
• Mary Kirtland's Designing Component-Based Applications

Upon completion, you will be able to:

• Identify the stages of a production life cycle.
• Apply appropriate security measures to the development environment.
• Understand the benefits of the development, testing, certification, and production life cycle.
• Describe a typical day in the production channel.
• Identify performance requirements.
• Explain how to perform software testing and application tuning.
• Understand the process of bug management.