Automated Setup and Tear Down of Complex, Multi-tier Test Configurations

Many software test and development teams struggle to test systems with complex set-up steps and multiple configurations. With these interdependent software systems, testers must iterate through very large, multi-dimensional test matrixes (for example, permuting front-, middle-, and back-tier platforms) to complete the test requirements. Testers have the difficult and sometimes seemingly impossible task of duplicating failures and saving the system’s state for later analysis and debugging. With several emerging commercial software tools, software development organizations can successfully implement live-state software test configuration provisioning and capture systems. James Phillips shares case studies of organizations that maintain comprehensive libraries of system environments used for repeated testing and organizations that give every developer and test engineer the equivalent of a fully equipped data center with dedicated provisioning staff.

• Pool and share server, networking, storage, and other resources between development and test teams
• Automatically set up and tear down complex, multi-machine software configurations
• Suspend and capture "live" multi-machine environments for both development and test