What if you could go back in time to the exact moment when a defect occurred? Or even better, go back just before it occurred, yet empowered with the knowledge that the defect exists and with the ability to test different scenarios. This is the essence of "Virtuology".
Virtuology is the combination of Virtualization tools and testing methodologies, which is about to transform the way we test.
"Virtuology allows you to record complete sessions for future analysis using common Virtualization tools. You can than go back in time to any point during the session and continue to run additional tests and collect data."
Why now?
Virtualization and Cloud Computing have long been known to increase the efficiency of the entire IT life cycle, including QA and testing. Areas such as automated environment setup, test environment simulation, compatibility and configuration testing and overall testing process time can benefit from these technologies.
Now, recent advances in virtualization have created what amounts to a time machine!
A Time Machine
With this time machine you can record and replay complete (testing) sessions including OS and application conditions, Network traffic and the actual lines of code. Once recorded, sessions can be viewed, paused, fast forwarded or rewound just like a DVR. More importantly, just like a DVR, you can go live at any moment and continue on another testing path.
You are probably thinking to yourself "Wow, a time machine, for testing…cool!". But, is this just another cool feature or is there more to it? To answer this question lets first discuss a number of common challenges that testers encounter on a daily basis.
What are your challenges?
A recent study of the defect life cycle in 28 testing projects, conducted by QualiTest, showed that about 9% of the defects receive "Can't Reproduce" status at some point of the defect life cycle. This can be attributed to inadequate reporting or to non-deterministic application behavior.
In an analysis of test execution activities it was discovered that testers spend only 20% actually conducting tests. The remaining 80% is spent on setup and reporting activities such as pre steps, creating data, navigating the application under test AUT and logging test results.
The cost and availability of testing environments and complex setup are often factors that hamper testing productivity. In addition, there are communication issues between testers & developers, which stem from the need for detailed documentation of defects and their scenarios.
Face your challenges with Virtuology
Virtuology provides tools that can assist you in facing these challenges successfully.
The benefit of working in a time machine
With Virtuology, you have an actual recording of a defect, as opposed to just a screen capture (which is already a huge benefit compared to traditional defect documentation). Developers now have the ability to explore the defect including rewind, pause and fast forward functionality. They can go live at any moment to try different scenarios or debug the issue.
Spend more time testing
Virtuology can also improve efficiency allowing testers to spend more time testing and less time on presteps or result documentation. The following examples should help to demonstrate this point.
Improve communication and reduce documentation
Virtuology allows you to manipulate the time dimension. All testing methodologies including Scrum/Agile, Waterfall and Spiral can benefit from Virtuology but no ware are the benefits as significant as in the case of Exploratory Testing
Traditionally, logging test results is a text based process. Testers usually include assumptions regarding the defect cause and anything else that they feel may be helpful to the developers that are tasked with resolving the issue. This approach is open to interpretation and common miscommunications.
Virtuology allows testers to provide a visual recording, in which the defect always occurs. With complete sessions and details delivered to the developers, communication issues are drastically reduced. Furthermore, without the need for extensive written reports, the overall time and hassles are greatly reduced.