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.