In this episode, Federico and Matthew talk about the benefits of having an automated test bed that can be easily transferred and run from any machine. They discuss some of the differences between a remote execution test bed and a portable test bed, and how the latter has worked well for the MVC feature crew.

News

• WebSiteSpark was released and is available for all web startups.

The portable test bed.

• How the remote execution test bed worked in the ASP.NET QA team.
  • Use internal test harness that can distribute tests on remote machines.
  • Enforces several design and execution paradigm on test authors.
• Problems and limitations that we faced with a remote execution test bed.
  • Difficult to share tests with other teams.
  • Difficult to react quickly to product changes.
  • Tendency for tests to be locked down to a specific execution environment.
• The concept of a "portable test bed" as a solution.
  • Test bed can be xcopy deployed to any target machine.
  • Low dependencies on external factors
• A layered automation infrastructure is preferable
  • Build automation solution that can move in a spectrum from high flexibility and high manual intervention to low manual intervention and potentially low flexibility.
  • If a high automated solution fails, tester can quickly and easily revert back to a more manual approach to achieve goal.