Ideal dev/test/QA environment for development

Question

I am working to rebuild my company's dev/test/QA environment. We have 10-15 programmers that are involved in a number of projects. They currently all develop locally on their PCs and use the dev environment for testing. We currently do not have a QA environment, so deployments are frequently a pain because bugs are usually found after something has gone live. Here's what I envision:

1. Doing away with everyone's local admin privileges and making everyone develop on a dev server
2. Create a QA environment that is identical to our production systems. This will allow them to test deployments.
3. Create a new test environment that is more locked down than the dev server so that proper testing can be done.

What are your thoughts? What is the best way to set up an environment like this? We develop ASP .NET applications using MS Visual Studio 2008 (if that helps).

Answer 1

As a developer, I would really hate if you locked me out of local admin privileges.

Why make everyone develop on a development server? Are your employees not all in an office environment?

The only thing I really like about your suggestions is the QA server identical to the production environment. Sorry.

You should be:

• Managing code through source code control
• Have a dedicated build manager that pushes the builds to the QA. Upon QA approval/business sign-off/insert your business process here, then the build manager pushes to production.
• Hope your have a test environment for your database, too. DBA should manage pushing database changes to production. Developers create on the test environment, which is a SQL Server/whatever on another server that everyone uses.
• If you're using MS products - consider making your projects WDP (Web Deployment Projects). MSBuild integrates with this, and you can fire off a build right from a TFS build task, for instance. Incremental builds, daily builds, manual only - it's really nice once you have it set up correctly.