During software development, software goes through a series of stages. Testing, for its part, is a critical stage of the software development life cycle as it can determine the quality of the software that is to be released to live production environments.
What is a test environment?
Once software tests are designed, they need an interface where they can be run or executed; this is what is referred to as a test environment.
Certain test cases may also require the environment to be prepared according to a particular set of data. This is what is referred to as a test bed. Thus, a test bed is a test environment prepared with test data to help you identify cases requiring a particular data setup.
Types of environments
Generally speaking, there are four types of environments in software development: