Test Smarter and Faster with Virtualization

HP: This white paper begins with an overview of virtualization and its potential risks. It then offers information on how to leverage virtualization for QA purposes, including ten tips:

1. “Automate as much as possible, because the value and pay off will be much more tangible and measurable.”
2. “Reach out and establish a relationship with the virtualization administrators.”
3. “Don’t underestimate the additional costs of going virtual in testing.”
4. “Remember that modern applications are distributed and in the virtualized test environment, and that virtual networking is required.”
5. “When you’re doing performance testing on a virtual system under test, you don’t want any automated migration or background moving of the virtual resources.”
6. “If you’re a QA manager or test team lead, enable your testers to learn more about different virtualization technologies and how they impact the AUT.”
7. “Create a comparison benchmark for test cycle times before you adopt virtualization.”
8. “When it comes to managing the virtual test lab, implement standard for the naming of VM resources, for base system VMs and AUT VMs.”
9. “While performance testing a single AUT VM, don’t forget to create the anticipated resource utilization (“noise”) of any other VMs that would be competing for shared resources of the virtualization platform.”
10. “Virtualizing any of the dependencies behind/underneath the AUT (commonly referred to as “stubbing”) can also help leverage maximum efficiency from a virtualized testing environment.”