Configurational Testing

Nowadays there’s large number of operating systems and so called middleware on the market of applications and services. And each one of these linking products has its own history of versions and releases, which implies that a software producer should provide his product’s compatibility with any combination of those.

E.g. if your product performs some kind of data integration from MS Outlook into Windows Explorer system application, a draft list of configurations would be as follows:

  1. Operating systems
    1. Windows XP ×32
    2. Windows XP ×64
    3. Windows Vista ×32
    4. Windows Vista ×64
    5. Windows 7 ×32
    6. Windows 7 ×64
    7. Windows 8 ×32
    8. Windows 8 ×64
  2. MS Outlook versions
    1. MS Outlook 2003
    2. MS Outlook 2007 ×32
    3. MS Outlook 2007 ×64
    4. MS Outlook 2010 ×32
    5. MS Outlook 2010 ×64
    6. MS Outlook 2013 ×32
    7. MS Outlook 2013 ×64

As we can see, the number of possible configurations’ combinations is rather big. Not every company is able to maintain a stock of testing hardware and software; moreover, creating architecture to provide one with the ability to put necessary software and hardware configuration together undertime is not only difficult, but also expensive.

It took much effort to create the hardware and software stock at TestLab² laboratory, which appeared to be worth boasting. Making the best use of both actual virtualization techniques and time-proved methodology of working with hardware test stations we can promptly create necessary number of either software or hardware configurations in order to test our clients’ products undertime.

We not only create necessary infrastructure for configurational testing but also look into and grok the product’s architecture in order to understand which system and 3rd-party components it depends on.

In addition, configurational testing usually implies checking product’s compatibility with popular software which can affect the performance of an entire OS. Here we first and foremost mean firewalls, antivirus programs and similar software deeply embedded into the OS and affecting its behavior.

When performing configurational testing, we, on demand, provide our customers with remote access to any of the test stations in order to facilitate the process of finding errors in applications and debugging them. This is essential time and resource saving approach that helps customers to avoid demurrage caused by minor technical problems and to get an access to any testing configuration immediately.