Automating the Virtual Testing Lab for Fun and Profit
Virtualization gives QA staff the next best thing to production systems
July 1, 2007 —
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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.”
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