Beautiful Testing

The Automated Test Lab

Tests need a place to run. Whether it’s 10 machines in an office or hundreds of machines in an offsite data center, careful planning of the lab, including a test deployment strategy, is crucial. For efficiency reasons, it makes sense to run tests in parallel across a bank of test machines rather than sequentially on a single machine. If compatibility is a concern on the test team, or if a variety of environments are required for any other reason, the number of machines needed to complete automated testing in a reasonable amount of time grows quickly.

An efficiently configured test lab requires that there are enough machines available to allow the automated tests to complete in a reasonable amount of time while not having so many computers that machine utilization is too low. Test labs require computers, space, power, and cooling. To best offset the cost of running the test lab, the machines in an automated test lab should be as busy as possible. In addition to effectively using the machines in the test lab for running automated tests, another tactic is to use the machines in the lab to run extended versions of tests, stress tests, or specific customer scenarios between runs of the automated test pass.

Deploying the Test Bed

The test lab will likely contain both physical machines and hosted virtual machines. Deploying virtual machines is usually as simple as copying the appropriate virtual hard drives to the host system. For physical machines, installing a fresh ...