Wim Demey

Blog about the unknown area of infrastructure testing

The case studies in this book show some approaches that were successful and some that were not. Many application areas, environments and platforms are described. The chapters cover commercial, open source and in-house tools, in traditional and agile development projects.
I had the honour to write chapter 22 "Test Automation as an Approach to Adding Value to Portability Testing".

Managing workstations is tough. No sensible IT department wants to allow configurations to diverge into hundreds of variations, one of the best ways to induce unexpected failures and increase support burden. So migration to updated third-party software needs to be done en masse, multiplying the impact if anything goes wrong. Complexity and uncertainty also are increased by changing multiple components at the same time: nevertheless this is the correct strategy because otherwise time and effort… Show more

Managing workstations is tough. No sensible IT department wants to allow configurations to diverge into hundreds of variations, one of the best ways to induce unexpected failures and increase support burden. So migration to updated third-party software needs to be done en masse, multiplying the impact if anything goes wrong. Complexity and uncertainty also are increased by changing multiple components at the same time: nevertheless this is the correct strategy because otherwise time and effort will be wasted on compatibility failures between the new and legacy components that will disappear when both are updated.In these ways migration is similar to rolling out an update to the organization’s own software. It’s a project, and needs to be assured in advance by testing. Cloud and virtualization do not change this fact, although in some circumstances they can make backout easier, affecting risks and priorities. Show less

Of all test types, portability testing is not the most frequent one being performed. However, if you have to support multiple configurations, you cannot bypass portability testing.
In most cases portability testing is just a subset of the functional
tests that are redone on the supported configurations. But what
about the installation of packages? Have you thought about the
impact of installation errors may have on the perception and trust
of end-users of your software? This is… Show more

Of all test types, portability testing is not the most frequent one being performed. However, if you have to support multiple configurations, you cannot bypass portability testing.
In most cases portability testing is just a subset of the functional
tests that are redone on the supported configurations. But what
about the installation of packages? Have you thought about the
impact of installation errors may have on the perception and trust
of end-users of your software? This is definitely a hidden area,
where portability testing could bring some added value. Furthermore, using test automation tackles the problem of having all hardware configurations and resources available. For this reason, I have worked out a promising solution to leverage the value of portability testing. Show less

Nowadays most test professionals are involved in the domain of
application development. A lot of test methodologies, templates
and tools help them to do their daily work in a confident and efficient way. But what about testing in the domain of infrastructure?
Why is this domain for most of us a real black and secret box?
Which arguments can we bring in the discussion to prove the need and added value of structured testing? And if we succeed to open the door, which strategy and… Show more

Nowadays most test professionals are involved in the domain of
application development. A lot of test methodologies, templates
and tools help them to do their daily work in a confident and efficient way. But what about testing in the domain of infrastructure?
Why is this domain for most of us a real black and secret box?
Which arguments can we bring in the discussion to prove the need and added value of structured testing? And if we succeed to open the door, which strategy and methodology can we apply? It is clear that infrastructure testing raise a lot of questions which will be answered in this article. Show less