(back from the dead… yay!)

Last week I participated in a webinar sponsered by Mercury and Akimbi on ‘Tomorrow’s Test Lab Today’ which was really a dog-and-pony show for Akimbi’s Slingshot application. Clearly this was a marketing presentation, but I’ll admit to being impressed.

Slingshot is an application for managing your virtual servers, which is something I advocate as being necessary in today’s Test Lab. What you do is pool all your servers into a group, and when you need a machine with configuration x, it will provision the next available piece of hardware for you. You might not, and depending on the size of your pool, it is statistically unlikely you would get the same physical machine twice in a row. What matters of course is that you get the same software, which having a virtual server will ensure.

If you have a small lab, this might be overkill, but for larger companies with distributed product teams (like say HP) this could be quite handy.

Webinar Archive
White Paper

Naturally I took notes.

  • Presenters
    • Michel Feaster – Directory of Product Management for Mercury Quality Center
    • James Phillips – CEO, Akimbi
    • Jason Tesarz – QA Automation Architect
  • Phrase: Server Sprawl
  • Measurement: Server to staff ratio Not sure what “good” is though
  • Server provisioning is a large chunk of overall testing time — as much as 50% in some cases
  • (Physical) System failures are major time sinks Don’t have to convince me of that in light of my laptop death
  • Akimbi Slingshot pushes virtual server images to a pool of shared machines
  • Tests should cover “business requirements” This is where they sell you Test Director to manage your requirements…
  • QA/Testing is therefore done to mitigate “business risk”
  • “3 options, pick 2” which Test needs to juggle
    1. Time to Test
    2. Risk of NOT Testing
    3. Cost to Test
  • Stages of Maturity of QA Organizations according to Mercury
    1. Testing done by individual product teams
    2. Hardware and Software consolidation between teams
    3. Contralized Testing group to allow for leveraging of expertise
    4. Creation of a “Quality Authority” to enforce and improve Quality enterprise wide
  • Why automate using Slingshot
    • reduce overall test time
    • creates “portable” test labs
    • better utilize scarce IT resources
  • Slingshot is
    • fully integrated into the Quality Center Suite
    • leverages VMWare and MS Virtual Server
    • can have Linux x86, Solaris x86 and Win* virtual servers