Back when I was a co-op in college, I had a dedicated machine where I did all of my testing. I meticulously followed a (usually very long) checklist to make sure that the latest and greatest feature worked as expected. Excel was our bug tracker and we certainly didn’t have anything to handle the testing work itself. The great thing was, we just installed the app and started testing!
Nowadays, testing is much more complex. Take our environment at Seapine as an example. Our products run on 4 operating systems against numerous browsers and databases. The luxury of having a dedicated machine to test on is long gone. Here at Seapine we have an entire room of computers dedicated to testing. And if that weren’t enough (turns out it’s not), each of those computer runs on swappable drives and we’ve virtualized a lot of the more exotic configurations. Based on discussions with our customers, this kind of environment is very common.
If you’re lucky enough to be using TestTrack TCM to track your testing efforts, we have a great little app that will simplify the process of logging test results. Rather than having to install the client in each environment, we’ve created a small web app that lets you quickly pull up a test case, run through the steps and submit results. The time-saver here is that you set it up once corporate-wide then testers simply open a web browser and start working. Whether they’re testing on their local machine or a vm image that’s run once per release cycle, it’s quick and easy to get through the test run.
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May 27, 2009
[...] Matt’s post on his co-op where he tracked tests on a spreadsheet made me reminisce about my old employer. You [...]