Testing opportunities in Agile environment

Agile methodology brings in some opportunities to software testing professional.

Automation is the general demand from project teams so that projects can be shipped as soon as the last code is checked in to source code. Automation of areas that don't change can be a great benefit to testers. Automating not well documented new feature can take much longer than any plan, unless it is done by the developer of the product.

Other changes in testing style that help agile projects

1. Do not call for rigid Testing Procedures as the requirements/features can change rapidly.
2. Test early and often.
3. Test from end user perspective and early
4. Build pass is a test case - don't you think so?
5. Adopt iterative testing - not waiting for the last build to start test cycle
6. Each recorded bug in the system is asset and liability. Liability in that there is fixed cost associated with the administration of the defect. Don't have the team motivation based on bug count - instead focus on quality of the product and the number of not already known issues returning from field
7. Module/unit testing (jUnit) can help - especially when the system level is not quiet ready
8. Practice light weight documentation style. Not a pretty verbose documentation.
9. Make reusable checklists - preferably in wiki
10. Testing Sequence for an incremental internal/external release

• New features
• Bug verification
• regression testing (run any automated test continuously)

Reference: Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_testing

Sparse Files

A sparse file attempts to use file system space more efficiently when blocks allocated to the file are mostly empty. This is achieved by writing brief information (metadata) representing the empty blocks to disk instead of the actual "empty" space which makes up the block, using less disk space. The full block size is written to disk as the actual size only when the block contains "real" (non-empty) data.

qcow2 - QEMU's Copy-on-write

qcow2 is a QEMU disk image format. As its name implies, it is a Copy-on-write format. QEMU can use a base image which is read-only, and store all writes to the qcow2 image.

Qcow helps in taking vm snapshots - or any file system snapshots.

samba for Linux > windows

Samba is used to access windows SMB/CIFS file system from Linux system.

smbmounts using mount command like

mount -t cifs ...

and

smbmount //server/share /localdir -o username=user,password=pass,uid=500,gid=500

WinPE from Microsoft

Microsoft allows creating and redistributing for free WinPE (Windows PreInstallation Environment). This CD gives an environment where NTFS disk can be explored. Programs can be executed. Load registry key from hard disk and explore it.

If the system blue screen or does not start from hard disk, WinPE is a good disk to explore the system. Note 32 bit 64 bit are different versions in WinPE.

openVPN - GPL?

OpenVPN is a possible use of VPN by small companies. Not too sure if this is for free or there is a small fees. This supports Windows, Linux & Mac clients to access corporate network. Like all VPN, the vpn will issue a new IP address for the communication through the vpn

PCI device drivers database

http://www.pcidatabase.com/

All PCI Drivers have vendor ID. This database enables searching the vendor database by name or by Device ID.

VSS - microsoft Shadow Copy or Volume Snapshot Service

Snapshot on Windows file system provides a stable version in time of all the files.

vssadmin create shadow /for=c:
vssadmin list providers

vss writers are available for the following Windows Services

1. Microsoft Exchange Server
2. Microsoft SQL Server
3. Microsoft Share Point servers

For efficient use of the shadow copy, the log files need to be flushed.

winexe - GPL

WinExe is a software that allows user to execute commands remotely on WindowsNT/2000/XP/2003/Vista systems from GNU/Linux.

http://eol.ovh.org/winexe/

Currently at 0.90 version. Main short coming is the return code from the Windows is not returned.

Watch out for the special characters in the credential are properly escaped.

This is not in active maintenance.

Microsoft's PsExec is the windows flavor of this product.

Xen Virtualization

Free Xen Server download ISO from citrix
http://downloadns.citrix.com.edgesuite.net/akdlm/5158/XenServer-5.6.0-install-cd.iso

Xen also available as LiveCD at http://www.xen.org/download/LiveCD/livecd-xen-3.2-0.8.2-i386.iso & http://www.xen.org/download/LiveCD/livecd-xen-3.2-0.8.2-amd64.iso

Not too sure what's xen Cloud Platform cd

Xen for some reasons don't want to shutdown (poweroff). This could be due to dom0 running on the hypervisor. The system running on Dom0 not able to shutdown the hypervisor.

Hyper-V

Hyper-V comes in 2 flavors

• Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
• part of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2

Standalone Hyper-V server is free to use. The Hyper-V management console has to be from Windows paid products like Windows server 2008 R2.

If you want a reasonable working system, install Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and use the Hyper-V console that comes with it.

The following servers run happily on Hyper-V

1. Windows 2003 32 bit
2. Windows 2003 64 bit
3. windows 2008 32 bit
4. Windows 2008 64 bit
5. Windows SBS 2003 32 bit
6. Windows SBS 2008 64 bit

Caveats (or known limitations)

1. The mouse don't work on remote desktop to Hyper-V console (I would prefer vmware esx/esxi to over come this shortcoming)
   
2. Grub4Dos based boot system has trouble under Hyper-V (This is not an issue with vmware esx/esxi)
   

There are many demo video for installing, configuring and using Hyper-V on YouTube.

Few learning

1. Make sure VT enabled in BIOS
2. Make sure you connect to Legacy Network (non-default) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc770380.aspx
3. Dell PowerEdge 1950 (1U) and 2950 (2U) are known good candidates for hosting Hyper-V