Infrastructure testing with TMAP
The deployment is complete, the build is live, and everyone takes a brief moment to breathe. Until it turns out that the software behaves differently than expected. Functionality that worked flawlessly in test environments starts failing in production. Issues are hard to reproduce, logs do not tell the full story, and soon the familiar phrase appears: “but it worked fine in test.” What feels like a technical incident is, in reality, a deeper quality problem. The software is functionally correct, but not suitable for the infrastructure it is now running on. Within TMAP, this is not a minor detail but an explicit quality attribute.
What does TMAP mean by infrastructure?
Infrastructure may sound heavy and technical, but within TMAP it primarily refers to the environment in which software must operate. This includes operating systems, cloud platforms, containers, databases, middleware, and networks. The point is not that TMAP dictates how this infrastructure should be designed, but that all of these components influence how software behaves.
The core question is simple but sharp: can this software reliably function in the intended environment without modification? The focus is therefore not on infrastructure itself, but on the dependency on it. As soon as that dependency remains implicit, risk emerges.
Why infrastructure is so often a hidden quality risk
In many teams, infrastructure choices are barely discussed. Configurations differ slightly between environments, versions gradually drift apart, and assumptions about availability, performance, or scalability are rarely made explicit. At the same time, testing is mainly focused on functional correctness within a single context. That works—until the context changes. Then it becomes clear that the software is correct, but only under very specific conditions.
Errors become difficult to reproduce, discussions shift toward “environment versus code,” and quality is only addressed once something has already gone wrong. If infrastructure is not explicitly included in quality thinking, you are effectively testing only part of the system, no matter how thorough the rest of the testing may be.
Recognizable real-world situations
Most infrastructure-related issues are not dramatic, but mundane. An application turns out to depend on local file paths that do not exist in production. Network latency causes time-outs that never occurred in test environments. A different database version introduces subtle differences in query behavior. Containers behave differently under production load than expected, or logging is missing exactly when analysis is needed. Functionally, everything appears correct, but operationally the behavior is unpredictable. That makes the system fragile, even though nothing is technically “broken” in the code.
Testing infrastructure suitability with TMAP
TMAP does not treat infrastructure as something to be tested in isolation, but as the context in which quality must exist. The focus is on asking questions that are often asked too late. In which environments must this system run? Which infrastructure dependencies influence its behavior? Does the software behave predictably across environments? What happens when resources become scarce, load increases, or configurations change?
These are not infrastructure tests in the classical sense, but quality tests in which infrastructure is explicitly included as a risk factor. This is precisely where TMAP helps teams make implicit assumptions explicit, before they translate into production issues.
The relationship with other quality attributes
Infrastructure never stands alone. Unreliable infrastructure undermines continuity. Unpredictable environmental behavior affects performance. Unclear infrastructure complicates maintainability, and differences between environments increase security risks. When infrastructure suitability is lacking, other quality attributes are inevitably compromised as well, even if they have been carefully designed in isolation. That is why TMAP does not treat infrastructure as a technical side issue, but as a foundational element of quality.
What you learn about this at Testlearning
In the e-learning TMAP: Quality for Cross-Functional Teams, you learn to approach infrastructure as a fixed part of quality thinking. You learn how environmental dependencies create quality risks, how to make those risks discussable, and how to take shared responsibility for predictable behavior across environments. Not by adding extra processes or tooling, but by observing more carefully, asking better questions, and bringing quality into the conversation earlier.
Test your software’s infrastructure upfront
Ultimately, the question is not whether your software works, but where and under which conditions it works. Does your software run everywhere it needs to run, or only where it was built? Infrastructure suitability is not discovered at go-live. It is safeguarded upfront, by assessing quality in the context in which that quality must exist.