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Automating the Virtual Testing Lab for Fun and Profit


Virtualization gives QA staff the next best thing to production systems

By P. J. Connolly
July 1, 2007 — 
Virtualization technology has been in use for a while, at first on the mainframe in the data center, and gradually becoming useful on the commodity servers in the racks.

Thanks in no small part to the rapid evolution and acceptance of EMC’s VMware platform, developers and testers have found virtualization useful in stretching their lists of usable platforms, by allowing them to test against system images from different operating system configurations that would be cost-prohibitive to manually install and configure.

But the next step in using virtualization as a development and testing tool is automating its use in the lab. Theresa Lanowitz, founder of analyst firm Voke, recently discussed her firm’s Market Snapshot report on virtual lab automation, released earlier this year.

Lanowitz began by explaining that although server consolidation has been the big sell for virtualization, there is a much broader role for it in the enterprise. She said pressures for improved software quality and lower time-to-market, as well as the increasingly outsourced nature of today’s IT landscape, are causing developers and testers to consider virtualization as plumbing, instead of as a novelty. Virtual lab automation, she noted, “gives to the quality assurance person, the test person…the ability to have an environment as close to production as possible.”

For companies that had made any serious effort to provide testing facilities to those people, Lanowitz noted, “it was really time-constraining and resource-intensive from a monetary perspective to be able to maintain those labs. And in some cases, they said, ‘This is just too much for us to do.’”

Lanowitz observed that a situation with three environments—the developer environment, the test environment and ultimately the production environment—leads only to unnecessary finger-pointing and harsh words between people who often work for the same IT organization.

“What virtual lab automation really brings to the game is that the tester can take a virtualized image of the production environment,” she said, adding that “they can find the defects, capture the URL of where the defect would be, send that URL to the developer, [who] brings up on their development machine that virtualized environment.”

Lanowitz cited another benefit of virtual lab automation: the ability to use offshore help better. Instead of packing up a computer in San Jose, sending it to Bangalore, India, and praying it isn’t lost or damaged in transit, “you give your offshore team a virtualized image of what they’re testing against or what they’re developing against. They don’t have to wait for anything…you’re saving so much time in provisioning.”

Time is the big savings, according to Voke’s research, she noted. “Going from two to three—or five to six—days down to a few minutes is a huge savings in time, and what that really equates to is less dependence by the QA organizations, and by the development organizations, on people in IT services.”

Time is people, and people are money, she continued: “You don’t have to have as many tactically driven people on the IT services side to set up those labs, and make sure the operating system has the correct patches and so on.” The headcount thus saved on “grunt” services can be redeployed, inside IT, or returned to the line of business.

“People who have implemented [virtualization] on the application development side see immediate benefits, immediate cost savings,” according to Lanowitz. “They can reduce their development and QA time by as much as 50 percent within a project life cycle.”

Lanowitz explained, “What virtualization is delivering now is a very flexible, malleable environment for people throughout the organization: sales, marketing, development, QA, operations.” It liberates them from the old machine-operating system lock-in, and allows the customer to “use whatever image or environment they need to use at any particular time on any piece of hardware. The future is really bright for this constant kind of virtualization across the entire enterprise.”

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
But the industry isn’t ready everywhere for virtualization, she noted. “One of the problems that we’ll see…is how are tools and applications licensed in this kind of a virtual environment? So many vendors license their software to a seat or a physical computer. What happens if you take that system and virtualize that, several times over? Do you need a separate license? Do you sell a virtualization license, if you’re a software vendor? These are the types of questions that the industry has not yet answered.”

Virtualization, Lanowitz concluded, “is something that goes across the entire organization, where the operations people have been using it for so long in the data center, and now the people on the development side are starting to take a look at this and say, ‘Guess what, we can reduce our dependency on cost.’ It squashes a lot of fears around the idea of security and around [whether] they’re using the correct environment.”


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