The availability of a shared application development and testing environment will provide agencies parallel production-like environments without having to maintain and purchase equipment for the department sites. Multiple standard environments can quickly be provisioned into a server partition in less than 15 minutes (based on predefined server builds and the proper tools) and can be tested on platforms that will closely imitate production without the risk of actually hitting a production environment. Testing will be a major component moving forward and the creation of a shared testing environment will enable multiple departments to utilize a test environment that will parallel production and be loaded with the necessary tools to help expedite the functional and performance required prior to moving in production. The move towards a higher utilized production environment dictates that thorough testing is a must in order to avoid any unnecessary outages due to applications that do not behave. Part of the new processes for promoting new applications or upgrades to code should be a review or certification of the new/updated code in a parallel testing environment to production. After receiving sign-off from the system administrators that run the data center, the new/updated applications can be promoted to production during the next logical maintenance window. Application profiling tools may also be considered to accelerate the testing and troubleshooting aspects of application development. Performance tests and scripting capabilities will greatly enhance the organization’s capabilities to truly capture metrics that are not being captured today.

Benefits of creating a shared application and testing environment are the following:

• Shared tools and development environments will greatly decrease the costs for support, tools, and hardware
• Provide a common known environment that is parallel to production resulting in a consistent view of functional and performance metrics of applications
• Create a standard for which applications must be developed therefore decreasing time to deployment
• Provide tools that are not available today that will accelerate the time required and the strict new standards that play a much bigger role in a consolidated production environment
• Reduces the number of errors by providing a parallel production environment.
• Eases the process in which applications can be promoted into production.
• Provides a more secure environment for which web and other portal applications can be tested

This project will provide an environment that departments can begin testing and making the necessary adjustments for applications that may not adhere to good programming standards. Additionally, developers will be able to become more familiar with the new production environment processes and code promotion activities necessary for a consolidated production environment. Typical annual savings seen in the industry for this type of effort range from 15%-25%.