Acceptance Testing
ITS has long suffered from the lack of a formal, complete acceptance testing environment. What is an acceptance testing environment, you ask? Well, it is an emulation of the production environment where developers can test new applications and systems to see how they will behave in the production environment, without risking the stability of actual production systems or applications. Basically we don't have such an environment. We have many components of it, but not the whole thing. Nor do we have an integrated approach to acceptance testing. Projects that are big enough to realize that they should do acceptance testing endeavor to build their own. This gets expensive real quick.
Well, after an intrepid manager at ITS pointed out that we really should build this environment, and that all other projects depend on it, we started the process to build it. I am the product manager for it, and Sonny Olsen is the project manager. We have had a few initial meetings with key managers to discuss what our strategy will be. We have received initial support from ITS executive management, and we are making this the top priority for the organization. I believe this is very appropriate. What about authentication, you might ask? Shouldn't authentication come before this? To that I would say, how do you propose to test this new authentication system before moving it to production? We must have an acceptance test environment.
My goal is to, as 5 of 9 puts it, "socialize" this priority so that it is on everyone's mind. It really is the key to a higher standard of service and reliability from ITS.
10:13:13 AM 
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