What’s the difference between a product manager and a product owner or are these roles actually one and the same?

If you’re wondering, you’re not alone. The terms are often used interchangeably and not without reason as sometimes the two roles’ responsibilities may overlap especially in small to medium-sized companies. 

However, Product Manager (PM) and Product Owner (PO) are two distinct roles. Although they do share a common goal, delivering products users love, the scope of their responsibilities is actually not identical. 

Generally, a product manager is responsible for the why. They shape the product roadmap based on users’ needs and desires. They are focused on business metrics and on whether the product is going in the right direction on a larger scale.

The product owner, on the other hand, is responsible for creating and managing the product backlog. They are operational and on a deadline. For them, it’s all about Scrum, back and forth with developers, and getting stuff done.

However, the lines between the two do often blur. Depending on where you work, you might be used to a variety of setups. 

What are the differences in responsibilities of a product manager and a product owner?

The short answer is: it depends.

Now, I’m sure you’re thinking ‘of course! Isn’t that true for everything?’

But in this case, it really does depend on a lot of different factors. A chunk of this article will go over them in detail but first we will discuss each role to highlight the responsibilities of each one on its own to be able to then understand their differences.

The product owner role

The term “product owner” comes from Scrum- an Agile framework that helps teams structure and manage their work and solve complex problems effectively by adopting a set of values and principles. A typical Scrum team consists of Product Owner, a Scrum Master and Developers with specific accountabilities. 

According to the “Scrum Guide”, the product owner is responsible for “maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team”. Consequently, this role is usually found in organizations that have adopted an Agile methodology. 

Among the key responsibilities of the product owner is creating user stories for the development team to implement and ensuring that these stories meet customer requirements. In other words, the product owner advocates for customer needs and represents the voice of the customer to the development team by making sure that the right product is being built. 

Some other responsibilities of the product owner include:

• Manage product backlog by creating and communicating the backlog items and prioritize them accordingly to maximize value
• Define and manage the product vision 
• Understand market and customer needs and turn them into actionable user stories
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams such as developers to ensure that products meet customer needs and requirements. They also make sure that goals are clear and business objectives are aligned with the product vision 
• Act as the primary point of contact for all stakeholders and ensure they have proper buy-in on all major decisions and strategies 

The product manager role

As we’ve seen, product owners are more tactical in that their focus is on maximizing value through creating and managing the product backlog. Additionally, product owners are more detail-oriented and have more of a short- to mid-term focus. 

Meanwhile, product managers play a more strategic role, which means their focus is more on creating the long-term vision of a product as well as aligning the product roadmap with larger organizational goals. 

They then build the product strategy in order to build a concrete product based on its overall vision that spans across the entire roadmap. Put simply, a product manager manages the entire product life cycle and oversees every aspect of its development from the early stages of user research to the moment of product launch.

The responsibilities of the product manager may vary from one organization to the next but they usually include the following tasks:

• Conduct user research to determine customer needs to determine product vision 
• Create and align teams around the product roadmap 
• Decide what features to build next
• Supervise teams and projects to ensure the successful launch of the product 

A product manager role is usually more outward-facing in that they speak to customers to define the requirements of the product to be built while a product owner is more inward-facing as they work closely with development teams to ensure the product is being built according to these requirements. 

We can look at product owners as an extension of product managers as they apply the strategies outlined by product managers and transform it into an actionable backlog.

In other words, the product manager decides what products or features to build next while the product owner oversees that developers build these products. 

Do organizations need both roles?

The simple answer to this question would be it depends. 

Various factors will need to be taken into account when it comes to deciding whether you need one or the other or both.

In an ideal scenario, there would be a product manager managing the product strategy and vision and a product owner responsible for executing that strategy. On the surface, it may seem that the responsibilities of the two roles may sometimes overlap as they’re working towards common goals but in reality, their day-to-day tasks differ significantly.   

However, not all companies may have the sufficient resources to have two different people dedicated to each of these roles.

Indeed, many small companies may find that having two distinct roles is not necessary and the responsibilities of the product development process can be carried out solely by the product manager. However, processes may become more complex in larger companies and could require a product manager to manage the product life cycle and outline the overall strategy and a product owner overseeing the development process to ensure the tactical execution of that strategy.

It’s important to also keep in mind that the product owner role is tightly linked with the Scrum development approach. Therefore, it’s typically found in teams practicing Scrum. Product managers, for their part, exist in organizations that aren’t necessarily following a specific approach or methodology. They can operate within any framework as part of the product team while product owners in highly Agile businesses come as part of a Scrum team.   

Nonetheless, many organizations struggle with the decision of whether to have one or the other or both. 

The most important consideration when making this decision is focusing on outcomes and not on the titles. Organizations need to examine their objectives and any weaknesses and bottlenecks in their current processes or structures that may hinder them from achieving these objectives. Such insights are key to building your winning team. 

When to consider a product manager vs product owner

Let’s not forget, there are products of all kinds: industrial products, agricultural products, services, chemical products, fashion and software products. 

In the SaaS martech space, the thinking goes that all products are built the same way and that companies are all structured the same way. They tend to think there is always a Product Manager and a Product Owner behind each feature.

We’ve already mentioned some things to consider when you’re deciding whether to have both roles. In this section, we look in further detail at some of these factors that determine the right setup for your organization.

1. Momentum

The most important criteria is ‘the momentum of the company.’ What does this mean?

How new/old is the organization?

This question is an important one. It is not directly related to the size of the company or to the number of clients, either. 

But rather, the right question here would be: How far or close is the company in relation to a specific “key moment”?

What we mean by ‘key moment’ are key phases or events in the life cycle of a company. Some examples include: 

• the creation of the company
• its sale
• new funding
• tax inspection
• a competitor’s release
• a crisis
• replacement of the CEO 
• … etc 

All these different key stages will have an impact on how the product development is executed.

And therefore, they affect what a product manager does and what a product owner does.

For example, just after a company is founded, the CEO is presumably the best person to take care of the product roles. They are very often (at least in scalable SaaS companies) the one who wears the hat of PO, PM, QA & Support. It is not a choice or a strategy. It is just what the moment implies.

Also, in general, the way a company’s momentum is handled defines how “well” a company is doing. 

Has the moment happening right now been anticipated, or is it just the consequence of the reaction of the last moment? The more a company reacts, the more “Agile” you can consider it to be. The more moments are anticipated, the more “visionary” you can consider the company. It’s challenging to be both.

2. Size matters

Size here doesn’t necessarily refer to the number of employees a company has. The size of a company could also refer to the number of:

• products
• models
• features
• scopes
• price grids 
• or markets they address. 

Cutting the products in the right “dimensions” and deciding if we split per market, per range or per topic can be a lifelong job, because it changes very often and the faster the company evolves, the more it has to be changed.

Size can also be defined by the number of users, clients, partners, retailers, languages, unit systems,… But also and more frequently, a combination of all the above will tell how many PMs, POs and Heads of Product your organization will need. 

For example, in many non-profits, product managers are based on the donor personas. You have a PM for small donation amounts (say $10 to $500), one for larger ones ($500 to $10,000) and one for those that are even bigger. Why? Because expectations from each persona type differ radically, and being able to cater to each will help the non-profit grow in the long run.

In short, the size of the company (its client portfolio, its product catalogue…) may define what the PM does, what the PO does, and how many of each there will be.

3. The remaining criteria

But these are not the only factors that define how many PMs, POs or any other product-facing people you will need. Many other factors can also be taken into account, including: 

• number of developers
• number of designers
• shipping velocity
• technical stacks
• tooling
• product lifecycle 
• individual wishes
• growth potential
• existing need coverage ratio 
• legacy ratio
• human resources policy 
• the market you address
• the level of politics installed in the company.

There is some kind of global agreement (at least in SaaS businesses) on the fact that the split between PM and PO is based on: vision vs. operations, projection vs. immediacy, value vs. metrics. But both are sides of the same coin.

In short, no two organizations are identical. In other words, there’s no one set answer to the question of what a PM vs. PO should do. Some organizations will need many, some will need none. Enabling people to work successfully together is hard enough. Copying and pasting a method won’t help – you have to find your own. 

What skills are needed to be a good product manager and/or product owner?

Both product managers and product owners need a good balance of hard and soft skills to carry out their tasks efficiently. 

The necessary skills for product managers include:

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• A good amount of technical expertise
• Prioritization skills
• Good business acumen
• Analytical skills

Meanwhile, the necessary skills for product owners include:

• Problem solving
• Project management skills 
• Great communication and strong storytelling skills
• Deep understanding of user data and analytics

The skills necessary for product managers and product owners may overlap especially in smaller companies where a product manager could also be a product owner and vice versa. 

What KPIs are used to measure success for product owners and product managers?

It depends and may vary from one organization to the other depending on their objectives 

However, if we tie them into their individual responsibilities, we can give a general overview of the kind of KPIs that can be used to measure their performance. 

A product manager, for example, has a wide range of responsibilities including the creation and prioritization of the product roadmap along with cross-team collaboration to ensure alignment around the roadmap.  

In that sense, a product manager’s performance is primarily related to product success in line with the overall business goals. Thus, usually product managers’ KPIs should be based on business metrics such as growth, revenue, churn rate and costs. 

Meanwhile, product owners have a narrower role and based on the responsibilities we outlined above, their success is measured using KPIs based on delivery, quality, and internal team satisfaction.

Conclusion

A product owner and manager are great assets to have but having both or two separate people taking on these roles is not a must for every organization. 

At the end of the day, the question is not whether you should have both a product manager and product owner but whether having both of those roles is right for your organization. You will have to look inward to understand what your business actually needs. 

How you decide to structure your teams will depend on the processes you have in place and the kind of outcomes you’re hoping to achieve based on business objectives, customer and company needs.

While we give an overall idea of each role, these responsibilities are not set in stone and they could widely vary on a case by case basis.

What really matters is that you have the right people with the right skills working towards a shared goal, which is building a product customers will love and meets their requirements and needs. 

We usually only see a product or service when it’s ready for consumption. 

But to get it to the shelf—both physically and virtually speaking—an all-encompassing process must take place. Even once a product or service is fit for consumption, there are a number of key considerations to make to ensure its success and market stability.

Effective product lifecycle management (PLM) is integral in almost every sector imaginable. It’s the product lifecycle manager’s job to spearhead the entire process, from development to decline.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the importance of PLM as well as to look at the core duties of a product lifecycle manager and what skills make a great product lifecycle manager in the modern software development world.

What is product lifecycle management?

We will first start by defining what product lifecycle management is to have a better understanding of the role behind it.

Product lifecycle management or PLM refers to all the processes, methods and technologies that are used to manage a product as it moves through the typical stages of its lifecycle from development through its introduction and growth to its decline and retirement.

The image below helps to envision the different processes that occur at each stage of the product’s lifecycle.

The product lifecycle refers to the progression of a product through its typical 4 stages (introduction, growth, maturity and decline) as well as more complex processes that occur within these stages such as inception, design, engineering, manufacturing, sales and marketing and distribution.

PLM is what helps to manage that lifecycle by aligning people, data, processes and technology to seamlessly bring the product to market.

Having a thorough understanding of the different stages of the product lifecycle is vital when it comes to developing new products as it helps answer questions such as whether it’s worth building the product and whether it would survive in the market before investing valuable resources. Afterwards, the next stage of product planning and preparing forecasts can begin.

Therefore, PLM essentially provides a framework that organizations use to manage their products through the different stages of its lifecycle.

It encompasses all aspects of a product including planning, managing, designing, and marketing through the use of dedicated software products and solutions that provide a single source of truth and visibility for all relevant stakeholders to monitor and track any changes to a product.

Why is product lifecycle management (PLM) important?

We can look at product lifecycle management as the glue that holds the entire process together, from ideation and development to production, promotion, and beyond. Without an effective PLM process, it’s unlikely that any production or service would ever see the light of day.

Above all, PLM is used as a means to develop a strategy to make better and more informed decisions to optimize every stage of the product lifecycle by aligning processes, data and technology to help businesses maximize profits. 

Because many departments are involved in product development, using a dedicated PLM software offers an all-around view of a product across various cross-functional teams to help them keep track of all products and their processes by allowing information to flow seamlessly between different teams. 

The purpose of such software is to shorten product development time while enhancing communication among teams through high-level visibility. An efficient PLM system will compile all your product data into a single database- a single source of truth- and manage this information flow which all relevant teams can access throughout the entire lifecycle.

In that sense, an efficient PLM system has a number of benefits including: 

• Higher quality products
• Enhanced information transparency
• Optimization of processes and workflows
• Improved product reliability
• Improved decision-making and forecasting
• Increased productivity
• Increased innovation
• Reduced time to market 
• Reduced costs
• Reduced waste
• Identification of new development and market opportunities

Thus, PLM serves as a backbone of any project to help teams cope with the increasing complexity and challenges of developing new products and quickly meet consumer demands through streamlined processes. 

What does the role of a product lifecycle manager entail?

As we’ve seen, when it comes to realizing a product, service, or innovation, there are several processes and entities involved. It’s the responsibility of the product lifecycle manager to bring all of these elements together and ensure that every stage of the journey is optimized for success.

The role of the product lifecycle manager is as varied as it is vital, and there are a wealth of responsibilities involved which largely depends on the lifecycle stage their product is in. This means that the skills needed and decisions made will differ from one stage to the next and so the product lifecycle manager will need to smoothly transition as the product evolves and shifts to the next stage.

Thus, the product lifecycle manager is the one who is primarily responsible for managing a product as it goes through the different stages of its lifecycle. This means that they also oversee the work of the entire project team to ensure they successfully and effectively complete each phase of the lifecycle.

What is expected from a modern product lifecycle manager?

The functions of a product lifecycle manager differ from day to day according to business and product needs. However, the core functions of a project lifecycle manager include the following:

• Introduction: Adopting the role of market or subject expert to get the product or innovation fit for the market. At this stage of the journey, extensive market research is required to identify gaps in the market and consumer needs as well as competitor analysis. The product lifecycle manager also needs to ensure that every department is working together cohesively for development, production, and launch.
• Growth: Once the product is fit for public consumption, the product lifecycle manager will then establish a plan to promote healthy market expansion and scalability, supporting the necessary departments or entities in optimizing sustainable growth.
• Maturity: At the point where the product in question is scaling and gaining momentum, the product lifecycle manager must work with internal and external stakeholders to sustain a market share and evolve the product’s commercial journey, thus securing a sustainable return on investment (ROI).
• Decline: When a product or innovation reaches its decline, a great product lifecycle manager will assume the role of a solution seeker. At this stage, it’s the lifecycle manager’s job to formulate the best strategic outcome for the product—whether it’s a case of resurrection and redevelopment or phasing out.

Product lifecycle manager: Key attributes for success

Being a product lifecycle manager is challenging to say the least, but if you have the skills and talent to be great, it is a career path that will offer endless rewards.

Do you want to know what it takes to be a great product lifecycle manager? Here are the key attributes required for PLM success: 

Qualifications and credentials

While there is no clear cut path to becoming a great product lifecycle manager, you will need relevant experience and qualifications related to product management and development to perform every facet of the job effectively.

It’s also imperative that you are digitally savvy. As such, to be a great product lifecycle manager you should be certified or well-versed in the technology, tools, and platforms that are standard within the sector. 

If you work in a specific product niche, conduct extensive research and gain every relevant credential possible. Not only will this make you more credible, but it will also provide you with a level of working knowledge that will give you an all-important edge on the competition—the kind of edge that will empower you to streamline and optimize every initiative you undertake.

Continual adaptability

In the age of information, technology evolves at a rapid rate. That said, every great product lifecycle manager should be completely adaptable to change—evolving with ever-changing methods, innovations, and concepts on a continual basis.

As a product lifecycle manager, it’s vital that you invest ample time in developing your skills and keeping your finger on the pulse. A lifecycle manager must be robust and innovative, and to be an ongoing success must adopt a mindset of lifelong learning.

If you read regular industry publications, attend expos and webinars, and enroll in courses that will help you refine your existing skills (or learn new competencies), you will propel yourself from good to great.

Analytical skills

We live in an age rife with digital data.

That said, to be an exceptional product lifecycle manager, it’s important to possess a sharp eye and analytical skills to match.

At every stage of the production journey, data will empower you to spot emerging trends, identify weaknesses, and make informed decisions that will accelerate the success of the process. Moreover, by harnessing data analytics to its fullest potential, you will be able to work with key performance indicators (KPIs) to set success benchmarks and foster smooth collaboration between departments. 

As a guide, here are the three key metrics you should know in great detail (these are particularly pivotal during the early launch and development stages):

• Traffic to product pages: An indicator of engagement and product interest
• Conversion rate: The percentage of users or consumers that take the desired action
• Adoption rate: The rate at which a product is acquired and used in certain marketplaces

By developing a deep understanding of essential PLM metrics and learning how to extract every last drop of value from the data while working with dynamic business intelligence (BI) tools, you will gain a level of insight that will make you an incredible product lifecycle manager.

A way with words

When it comes to product lifecycle management, this is an attribute that people often overlook. But to become great, having a confident, articulate way with words is essential.

Almost every day in the working life of a product lifecycle manager is crammed with conversations, both in person and via project management platforms, remote conferences, and email exchanges.

As a product manager, it’s your duty to share and deliver a wealth of product-related information to a variety of stakeholders, both internally and externally. That said, you need rock-solid interpersonal skills, excellent public speaking abilities, and writing attributes that will allow you to adjust your tone or language depending on your point of contact.

Every great product lifecycle manager has an extensive way with words—in every situation and across all platforms. Work on these skills and you will accelerate your success in the fast-paced world of PLM. 

Sales skills

As a product lifecycle manager, you will need to be able to sell a vision to potential partners throughout every project.

Naturally, having a way with words will help you sell your vision to potential engineers, manufacturers, marketers, stockists—the list goes on. But in the digital age, having digital selling skills is also imperative. These competencies include the following:

• Targeted content creation to engage specific users and generate leads
• Building trust through social media engagement
•  The ability to optimize conversions through innovative promotional campaigns
• Superior digital research skills to understand your target sector on a deeper, more meaningful level

To generate and nurture leads across a host of touchpoints—from social media and email to mobile applications and beyond—you will need to have an astute ability to be persuasive and build relationships both in person and in a virtual sense. Acquiring this attribute will boost your career prospects, exponentially.

Accountability and the ability to lead

As a product lifecycle manager, the ability to take accountability and lead a project with respectful authority is perhaps the most important soft skill you can possess.

Not only will you have to take the helm concerning strategic decisions at every stage of the journey, but you will also need to guide each entity within any given project towards one common goal. 

If a roadblock presents itself or an issue occurs, you must be accountable and take ownership. And, if you believe that individuals require additional support or guidance, it will be up to you to listen and offer mentorship—well, you will if you’re a great product lifecycle manager.

Moreover, at the growth and maturity phases of the lifecycle, you will need to display powerful leadership skills to spearhead new commercial relationships and reach bold new marketplaces.

Product lifecycle management: Unlock better & higher value products

Bringing an idea to life is no easy feat, and that’s an understatement. But with the passion, drive, and commitment to acquiring the right attributes, it is more than possible.

Expectations and demands for better products continue to grow and as organizations work fast to keep up, their product portfolio also grows and becomes more complex. 

The product manager’s work is never truly done but having the right PLM system in place will help them meet these demands by ensuring that the entire organization is focused on producing high quality products that ensure customer satisfaction.  

The whole process of PLM should primarily revolve around providing better value for your customers to truly have a successful product in your hands. 

To deliver better value, it’s also important to collect feedback at each stage of the product management lifecycle as it helps teams to continuously validate and optimize their products and to reveal hidden possibilities and ideas for a product.

During software development, software goes through a series of stages. Testing, for its part, is a critical stage of the software development life cycle as it can determine the quality of the software that is to be released to live production environments.

In this article, we will be focusing on test environments and the types of testing that can be run in such environments and why test environments are an important part of your software pre-release strategy.

What is a test environment?

Once software tests are designed, they need an interface where they can be run or executed; this is what is referred to as a test environment.

Test environments need to be configured according to the needs of the software being tested and must be set to ensure that the software operates in the right conditions. In other words, there is no one-size-fits-all solution as it is the code that dictates the environment’s setup.

Thus, no two test environments are the same as they require a different setup to test different parts of the code- the parts that make the whole.

Certain test cases may also require the environment to be prepared according to a particular set of data. This is what is referred to as a test bed. Thus, a test bed is a test environment prepared with test data to help you identify cases requiring a particular data setup.

The main purpose of such environments is to allow QA teams to check system components and uncover errors and issues so the environment must closely replicate real user conditions. Once issues are detected, they can be fixed without affecting real users and negatively impacting their experience.

The elements of a test environment include the following:

• The software to be tested
• Test data
• Network configuration
• Device on which the software is to be tested
• Database server

Types of environments

Before we delve deeper into test environments, we will first discuss the types of environments that precede and follow test environments. In this context, environments refer to the server location of the application or software, which are divided according to the state of the software.

We will briefly go through each of these environments to better understand how they are linked to distinct stages in the release process.

Development environment

As the name suggests, this is where the development of the software takes place. It is the first environment where developers write the first lines of code and do all the code updates.

This environment usually consists of a server that is shared by several developers working together on the same project.

Therefore, when multiple developers are involved, a developer would have a copy of the source code on their own machine and then changes are submitted to the repository which are then integrated into the trunk or branch.

A number of preliminary testing takes place at this stage before moving on to the next stages.

For example, if developers have adopted a continuous integration methodology for their software development process then several changes daily would be committed to the trunk.

Testing environment

The testing environment allows QA engineers to test new and changed code whether via automated or non-automated techniques.

Development environments are ever-changing as developers keep adding new functionalities which makes it difficult for QA teams to run time-consuming tests so a testing environment is where they can execute more complex and time-consuming tests.

The code at this stage usually goes through more than one QA environment where unit tests are first conducted and the code is moved to further test environments.

Thus, you can either run tests one after the other or you can create several testing environments that allow for parallel testing to take place, depending on the sophistication of your testing environment.

More details about the different types of software tests will be discussed in the next sections.

Nonetheless, the focus here is testing individual components rather than the entire application, to check the compatibility between old and new code, the system’s performance and so on.

If there is a test failure, the faulty code can be removed in this environment. Thus, testers can ensure the quality of the code by finding any bugs and reviewing all bug fixes. However, if all tests pass, the test environment can automatically move the code to the next deployment environment.

Staging environment

This environment is a nearly exact replica of the production environment so it seeks to mirror an actual production environment as closely as possible to ensure the software works correctly.

The staging environment is often restricted to a small number of selected users and so it is limited to certain IPs and developer teams.

The purpose of this environment is to test on a near-production level but in a non-production environment to verify that the application will behave correctly after deployment. Thus, it represents a safe space away from the public eye to make sure everything works as expected; it is kept invisible from end-users.

The focus here is to test the application or software as a whole. In other words, staging environments are where you can conduct tests to ensure that no problems come up in production and limit negative impact on users there so that when the software is deployed to the production environment, there will be fewer errors to fix.

Examples of the kind of test that can be run in this environment include smoke testing and in particular load testing since it can be difficult to replicate high volumes of traffic in a staging environment to test the software or application under stress.

However, keep in mind that a staging environment is not meant to be a substitute for a real-world production environment.

To ensure your product works as it should, you need both a testing and staging environment, where the testing environment makes sure that every component does its job while the staging environment ensures that your software would behave correctly in an environment almost exactly the same as production.

While you can run many tests in a staging environment, the best way to truly determine how a feature performs is to test it on users in real-time, for example, through testing in production.

Production environment

This is where the software is produced and is running on a production server. It has officially gone live to real users.

When deploying a new release to production, rather than immediately deploying to all users, the release can be deployed in phases to a segment of your users first to see how it performs to catch and fix any additional bugs before deploying to the rest of your users.

In other words, just because you’re in the production environment, it doesn’t mean tests have to end here. You can and should still be testing in production. This can be done with the help of feature flags, which allow you to safely test in production on a pre-selected number of users.

Now that we’ve covered the main environments a software progresses through in its lifecycle, we will turn back to test environments and the type of testing that can be conducted in that particular environment.

Why is software testing required?

While we’re big advocates of testing in production, we acknowledge that some cases require dedicated test environments before moving forward onto production environments.

Before we move further to the types of software tests, it is important to shed light on why software testing is an essential modern software development practice. Choosing to skip this process is not advisable and may end up negatively impacting your products and business.

Below are just some of the reasons why software testing is so imperative nowadays:

• Cost effective– testing your software will end up saving you money in the long run as testing the software will allow you to uncover bugs early on when it would cost less to fix them.
• Security– software testing ensures that the software you’re releasing is free of any issues and thus you can guarantee your customers that your products are trust-worthy and safe to use.
• Product quality-as software goes through continuous and diversified levels of testing, this ensures that bugs are detected along the software’s development process resulting in higher quality products.
• Customer satisfaction– one of the main reasons tests are conducted are to ensure they provide the best user experience possible by making sure that the releases are stable and without any issues thereby achieving customer satisfaction.
• Continuous delivery– an efficient setup of software testing would allow developers to push code changes into a CI/CD pipeline to go through the various levels of testing. If the code passes the tests, it can be automatically into production and if it fails it would notify developers so that they fix the issue. In other words, setting up automated testing allows you to maintain continuous delivery and to deliver higher-quality releases to end-users quickly.

Meanwhile, having a test environment to run these tests is essential as it provides you with a dedicated environment where you can isolate the code and verify the behavior of the application so it provides you with accurate feedback about the quality and performance of the software you’re testing.

Types of software testing

There are different types of tests that help analyze various elements of the software such as performance, security and user experience.

While a staging environment allows teams to replicate real testing conditions, tests will still need to be run beforehand to test its individual components to make sure that it all works well together to satisfy quality assurance requirements.

Below, we will highlight some of the most common tests which can be run during the software’s lifecycle:

Performance testing

These tests measure how fast an application responds to an interaction and so various aspects of the application such as page load speeds, stability and reliability are tested so that developers can make improvements as needed.

System integration testing

The main purpose of this testing is to ensure that all modules of an application work together smoothly and can communicate with each other. The interaction with the database is also tested.

Thus, it is all about making sure that the individual parts can function together as a whole.

User acceptance testing (UAT)

This testing is conducted to ensure that the application meets the business requirements of users and to ensure that functionalities of the application achieves customer satisfaction. UAT requires the whole application to be up and running and so usually represents the final stage of testing.

This type of testing also usually requires a staging environment- identical to a production environment but not accessible to end-users.

Alpha testing

After user acceptance testing is carried out within the development and product teams, testing can be expanded to include other kinds of users.

During Alpha testing, the release is tested outside of the teams involved in the project. It is typically conducted on internal users or employees within the organization and is usually followed by beta testing.

This test helps identify any bugs or issues before finally releasing the software to the end-user.

It attempts to simulate a real user environment by carrying out the same tasks and operations that the actual user will perform within the release to make sure it satisfies all of its functionalities.

Beta testing

In this testing environment, the software is released to a limited number of real-world users outside the organization to obtain their feedback which is then forwarded back to developers to optimize and improve the release as needed before releasing to all users.

It also tests the application or software under stress, where such load testing will help uncover any bugs that were not previously spotted.

Read more: Difference between alpha and beta testing

Test environments best practices

As we’ve seen, testing is an essential part of the software development life cycle and so test environments must be efficient and reliable to ensure the quality of your products and they must be well-managed.

In this section, we’ll highlight some of the essential best practices for test environment management:

First, it is important you start testing early on in the development process. In other words, don’t wait too long to run tests on every commit.

Otherwise, when teams don’t test early, they end up with a number of bugs later on and at that point fixing these bugs would require a lot of time, cost and effort.

Second, try to reduce manual processes by introducing more automation as that will save you time and resources while your team can dedicate their time to building and improving the product instead of tedious manual tasks.

Furthermore, before creating yet another new test environment, verify if it’s possible to use an existing one. If you already have an existing infrastructure, then that will go a long way in saving you time and money.

Another thing to verify is that you actually have all the required software and hardware, which includes physical servers, licenses, operating systems, etc.

It also goes without saying that you need to consider how to ensure the maintenance of the test environment such as who’s responsible for its maintenance and how to ensure the reliability of the environment.

The main takeaway here should be to…

Test, test and then test some more starting early on in the software development process.

To reiterate, test environments represent an efficient and a safe space to conduct all your essential and most basic tests.

However, don’t forget that just because you think you have run a sufficient number of tests in your test environment that you should discard testing in production altogether.

Yes, test environments are great for ruling out bugs early on but they are not an actual production environment. The best way to guarantee the quality of your products is to test them on a segment of your users during production, i.e in the production environment.

You can now do this safely with feature flags, which allow you to test on a small segment of users and disable any buggy features instantly.

Find out how AB Tasty leverages the power of feature flags to safely test new features in production by signing up for a free trial now.