Using the Lab During the Project Life Cycle

To help you justify the cost of the lab, consider the many ways you can use it throughout the project. This section provides examples of ways you might use your lab.

Planning

During early planning, project team members use the lab for hands-on experience: increasing their understanding of the technology, testing their hypotheses, and uncovering implementation issues and support requirements. This is also a good time to look for ways to optimize existing operational processes, such as identifying tasks that can be automated or performed remotely.

As designing progresses, team members use the lab to try out new technologies, models, and processes while they resolve business requirements. Such prototyping and modeling leads to business decisions about how you will implement Windows 2000 features and functions.

Developing

During development, the lab provides a controlled environment for testing and evaluating a variety of issues, such as the following:

• Windows 2000 features
• Network infrastructure compatibility
• Interoperability with other network operating systems
• Hardware compatibility
• Application compatibility
• Performance and capacity planning
• Installation and configuration documentation
• Administrative procedures and documentation
• Production rollout (processes, scripts, and files; back-out plans)
• Baseline traffic patterns (traffic volumes without user activity)
• Tools (Windows 2000, third-party, or custom)
• Operational efficiencies

Deploying

During the pilot deployment, the lab provides operational teams, such as the help desk and operations staff, with a place to start planning the ongoing support structure. You can also use the lab during the pilot and production deployment to isolate, reproduce, analyze, and correct problems with the deployment process.

Post-deployment

After deployment, the support team can use the lab to reproduce and resolve problems found in the production environment. The lab also provides a secure location for testing changes, such as service packs, patches, new applications, or new desktop configurations, as part of the change management process.

Figure 4.3 illustrates a variety of uses for the lab and the project phase in which some activities might occur. The time frames are estimations and do not represent an actual deployment.

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Figure 4.3 Role of the Lab in the Project Life Cycle

The lab is not the only place where testing occurs. Project team members can also test functionality on their individual test computers. However, the test lab is the place to verify that components and features work together in an integrated environment that simulates your target production environment. The simulated environment should reflect both the phase-in period, when you have a mix of functionality, and the end of the project, when you have completely implemented the new functionality.

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