What are some common tools for installation testing?

Introducing a new student to the rest of the class gives us a practical example of the installation testing. The new student should be properly introduced to the rest of the class so that he/ she feel comfortable. Same holds true for software systems and applications. The effectiveness of any testing however also depends up on the type of the testing tools used. In this article we shall be discussing about some common tools for installation testing. 

If the installation of your software product fails, what impression it will make of you on the customer? Obviously it will cost you your reputation. How can you avoid such pathetic and embarrassing conditions? "Answer is by testing the software system’s or application’s installer with an appropriate combination of both the automated and manual processes on different machines and with different configurations". 

The factor of which you should be most concerned is nothing but “time” since installation testing eats up a lot of time, so you got to be wise and use testing tools that can save up your time. Execution of even a single test case takes a lot of time in installation testing. Now imagine if you are going to perform installation testing on a big software system or application? How much it is going to cost you? Before you start installation testing you need to decide on how many systems and configurations you are going to install the application software. Prepare a basic hard disk drive for this purpose with some other basic necessary components.

Role of Installation Testing Tools

- There are testing tools available that will help you in making sets of each of the configurations like file format and operating system that are used in the further installation testing.

- There are many other tools that can be used to automate the whole installation testing process.

- This involves setting out some systems for creating basic images of the base configuration. This can be done by using testing tools like Norton ghost which can create exact image of the operating systems very accurately and quickly.

- This step is guaranteed to save a huge amount of your time for each test case.

- Creating images takes only 5- 10 minutes whereas installing one Operating System with basic configuration takes up to one hour.

- There are some other tools that allow you to use one operating system with multiple attempts of installation.

- But in this case you will need to uninstall the application again and again and prepare the base state for the next installation.

- Apart from all the other testing tools, use flow diagrams also serve as a great aid for performing the installation testing.

- Use flow diagrams simplify the whole task so amicably.

- These flow diagrams can be further used for automating the test efforts since very easily these diagrams can be converted in to the automated scripts.

- Some test tools have been developed that test the installer scripts which are further used to check the disk space required for the installation.

- These tools make sure that only the required amount of space is utilized and not more than that otherwise an error is flagged. You should be careful with the fact that the space required is different for different file system formats.

- Another tool that can help you a big deal with installation testing is “distributed testing environment”.

- Adopting this methodology you can very effectively handle all the different test cases from just one machine and it saves you a lot of time.  

What is release planning and what is the need of release planning?

Release planning forms a very important part of the whole software development life cycle and from the term itself you can make out that it is related to the release of the software product.

What is a Release Plan?

- A release plan is drawn up during the release planning meeting. 

- The purpose of the release planning meeting is to lay out the overall project plan. 

- The release plan is further used to plan the iterations and schedules for the other processes. 

- For every individual iteration, a specific iteration plan is designed keeping in mind the specifications of the release plan. 

- It is important that a balance should be maintained between the technical aspect and the business aspect of a software project else the development conflicts will arise and the developers will never be able to finish the software project on time. 

- So, to get a better release plan it is important all the technical decisions must be handled by the technicians and all the business decisions are taken up by the business people. 

How to draw a proper release plan?

- To draw out a proper release plan, it is important that these classes of the stake holders co- ordinate properly. 

- In order to facilitate the co- ordination among these two, a set of rules has been defined for the release planning.

- With these rules it has been made possible that each and every individual involved with the project is able to state his/ her own decision.

- With such a way, it gets easy to plan a release schedule to which every one can commit to. 

- Otherwise, the developers will find it difficult to negotiate with the business persons. 

- The essence of the release planning meeting lies in the proper estimation of all the user stories in terms of the ideal programming weeks. 

What is an ideal programming week?

Now you must be wondering what an ideal programming week is. 

- The ideal programming week is defined as how long one can imagine regarding the implementation of a particular user story if there was nothing else to be done. 

- Here by nothing else we do not mean a total absence of the other activities! 

- It only means the absence of the dependencies and extra work but presence of tests.

Factors on which a release plan depends are:

- The importance level of a user story is decided by the customer itself.

- He/ she also decide how much priority is to be given to which user story regarding its completion. 

- There are two factors based up on which the release plan can be drawn:

1. Scope or
2. Time

Role of Project Velocity in Release Planning

- A measure called the “project velocity” helps with the release planning. 

- This measure proves to be a great aid in determining the number of the user stories that can be implemented before the last date of the completion of the software project.

- Or in the terms of the scope, the project velocity helps in determining the number of user stories that can be completed. 

- When the release plan is created according to the scope, the total weeks of the estimated user stories is divided by the project velocity to obtain the total number of the iterations that can be carried out till the due date of the project completion. 

Philosophy Underlining Release Planning

The philosophy that underlies the release planning is that the quantification of a software product can be done by the below mentioned 4 variables:

1. Scope: It defines how much work is to be done.
2. Resources: It states the number of the people available.
3. Time: It is the time of the release of the software product and
4. Quality: It defines how good the software is. 

How does a definition clear path play a role in data flow testing?

Definition clear path is a quite less heard term! This article is focussed up on the concept of definition clear path and what role do it plays in the data flow testing. First let us define what is a definition clear path in actual. 

"A definition clear path as it can made out from the term itself that it is a path through which other variables cannot be defined or through which other variable definitions cannot be made."

To make the meaning of definition clear path clearer we shall look up to an example:

- Suppose X be a variable declared or appearing in a software program or procedure. 

- Suppose there is a path $which\; do\; not\; contain\; any\; nodes\; with\; definition\; of\; the\; variable\; X.$

- Such a path not containing any variable definitions has been termed as a definition clear path. 

We can now define this definition clear path as a path between the two nodes namely A and B, with X being defined in A and an use in node B and there exists no other definition of variable X between the two nodes present in the path. 

Let us see another example to explore another type of definition clear path that can exist. 

- Suppose the above same variable X be defined at a node A along with an use defined at the another node B.

- Suppose the path formed by these two nodes A and B does not appears in the sub path, then such a path is also defined as a definition clear path for the X variable defined by the nodes A and B if the variable X is not defined in the sub path. 

- There is another common name for the definition clear path which is “def- clear path”. 

Now let us talk about the role that the definition clear path plays in the data flow testing. Actually in the data flow testing, there are three types of coverage that have to be provided namely:

1. Statement coverage
2. Branch coverage and lastly
3. Path coverage

Basically problems are faced with the path selection process. A definition of the variable X reaches a use if and only if there exists a sub path such that the sub path is a definition clear path with respect to the variable X. The path selection in the data flow testing is based up on the two criteria:

1. Rapps and Weyuker criteria: Under these criteria the definition clear sub paths from definitions to uses are listed.
2. Laski and Korel criteria: Under these criteria the various combinations that reach uses at a node via some sub path are listed.

How does Definition Clear Path play a role in Data Flow Testing?

- Definition clear paths have been known to make remarkable improvements in the control flow techniques for data flow testing.

- A rational is obtained for which there is a need to take in to consideration all the combinations of the sub paths. 

- The “all uses” is the most commonly preferred criteria.

- There are some paths in a program that are infeasible and it is these paths that pose a big problem in the data flow testing. 

- The path testing strategies are based up on the data flow anomalies. 

- Enough paths are required to be tested so that it is ensured that every object in the program has been initialized before use and have been used at least once during the program execution. 

- For a complete data flow testing it is required that definition clear paths are executed by the test cases from each node that contains a defined variable.