Systems Engineering methods and tools for efficient IT project testing in the Cloud

Most Information Technology (IT) organizations find that the maintenance of test and development environments is a major concern. This paper describes the significant benefits that can be attained when Systems Engineering (SE) and Cloud technology are combined to manage an organization's test and development environments. This combination provides tight governance around automated provisioning and decommissioning of environments allocated to projects. The benefits are: 1. Greatly reduced time to procure test servers/systems; 2. Tight scheduling and governance of test/dev systems; 3. Significantly reduced number of servers used for test; 4. Significantly reduced number of people needed for test; 5. Reduced dev/test server waste caused by lack of governance and management; 6. Significant energy savings during test and development phases. Systems Engineering methods and tools for cloud, such as Application Virtualization, can greatly enhance testing efficiency. Case studies, using private clouds with SE methods for test and development systems, are described in the paper.