Use VS 2010 to improve the level of automation of software testing (3)

Auto-layout/restore test environment

At present, I think most of our development team is through the human to decorate or say to build test environment, Let's say we're going to test a SNS site developed with ASP.net, after preparing the relevant hardware, we must find a tester, or a developer, the conditional unit may find a dedicated IT staff, in short, to find a person (we call him Xiao Wang) to install the operating system, Make the necessary service packs for the operating system, upgrade some hotfix online or offline, then install the database system, make the necessary service packs for the database system, then install the. NET Framework, configure IIS, and finally copy, install, Configure the new build released SNS website; after a period of time, quick words may also be one or two days, when the site updated build out, comrade Xiao Wang usually have to reformat the test machine, reinstall the configuration of the operating system, database system, other necessary software and class library and SNS website the latest build , obviously, the process will be repeated until the project is over.

According to statistics, the workload of the Layout/restore test environment usually accounts for about 30% of the total workload of the tester, and may even be higher. To effectively reduce this workload, VS 2010 provides a feature called "Lab Management", a feature based on computer virtualization that not only dramatically reduces human input in the lap/split test environment, it can even be implemented from build code, To the layout of the test environment, to deploy the system, to run the test the entire process of automated assembly line, or called a dragon-style management.

The concept of a virtual machine snapshot (VM snapshot) that has been used by Hper-v friends (refer to Figure 1) should not be unfamiliar, and we can restore the entire virtual machine to its previous state (checkpoint) by using the virtual machine's snapshot function. This is similar to the Undo feature in many applications, such as word.

[Virtual machine snapshot in different ' tenses ' in Figure 1:hyper-v]

The Lab Management function in VS 2010 is also based on the virtual machine, which realizes the rapid layout and restoration of the dummy test environment, and it goes farther. We know that in many cases, a test environment may contain more than one computer, including multiple computers, such as a typical test environment for a three-tier Web application that can be built on a Web server and a database server, if you are testing with a virtual environment, Then this virtual environment should contain a Web virtual machine and a database virtual machine (refer to Figure 2).

[Figure 2: Test environment for a three-tier application consisting of a Web server virtual machine and a database server virtual machine]