Route-to-Live

NHSBSA follow a strict route-to-live policy to ensure a stable and robust SDLC. The NHSBSA Test Strategy refers to our route-to-live principle that must be followed along with the guidelines on the types of testing that should be conducted in each test environment.

Test Environments

Our different test environments and their usage and features are described below.

Environment	Test Type	Features / Notes	Owner	Mandatory / Optional
BUILD	Unit Test, Integration Test (“integration in the small”)	There may be more than one Dev environment - per developer and/or per squad. A branching strategy MUST be in place	Developers	Mandatory
TEST	Functional Acceptance Test (incl. Build Acceptance Test), API Test, Compatibility Test, Accessibility Test	There must only be one primary Test environment. The code and config baseline must be known and well documented. In some cases, a delivery team may consider multiple or ephemeral Test environments for testing code / features / infrastructure isolated from primary TEST or INT. In ALL cases: a risk assessment must be considered, and the code must be deployed into the primary TEST environment for a full test on the correct code baseline.	Testers	Mandatory
INT (Integration)	Integration Test (“integration in the large”), End-to-End Test	For some services, integration testing with other NHSBSA services or 3rd party services is required. Here the technical integration is tested along with the end-to-end flow of the user journeys. The code and config baseline must be known	Testers	Optional
PERF (Performance)	Performance Test	For some services, a performance test is required. Not all services will spin up a separate Performance Test environment. The code and config baseline must be known	Testers	Optional
STG (Stage)	User Acceptance Test (UAT)	The baseline here should be the final baseline candidate that is to go live	Business / Product Owners	Mandatory
PROD (Production)	Smoke Test	Testing in Production should be limited to a small smoke test to ensure a release has been deployed correctly. Any test data created during the test must be removed prior to live activities	Live Services	Optional

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