Software test environments: Overlooked in licensing?

There is no doubt that test environments are the lifeblood of high-quality technology solutions. In a recent discussion with another IT professional, the issue of test environment licensing came up and clearly became a grey area that is applied differently between organizations. In the case of Microsoft licensing, larger enterprises have a distinct advantage to licensing test environments when engaged in Microsoft Software Assurance (SA). While there may be slight differences of what differentiates a test and QA environment, generally a QA system has a longer lifespan. Further, QA systems usually are fully licensed in all regards like their production counterparts.

Fine print and vague or missing clauses are common in software licensing, and test environment licenses share those same ills. For organizations that do not maintain Microsoft SA, the base operating system licensing can be very expensive to maintain for Windows Server, SQL Server database and other systems. For the operating system, evaluation licenses can usually accommodate temporary use. For ongoing use, the practice and options become unclear. The Microsoft SQL Server product continues to offer a free edition, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express. The issue from a test/QA standpoint becomes if using the Express edition is representative of the end configuration or product being tested.

This is not an issue for the most part for organizations utilizing free products end-to-end, such as Linux for an operating system and open databases such as MySQL. There may be licensing considerations if any commercial tools or other licensed software titles are used or tested, however.

How are you approaching this topic? Ideally all systems are licensed the same way, but the informal tiers of testing may be omitted from an organization’s larger licensing initiative. Share your comments below on test environment licensing.