Topic: Testing of Storage Lifecycle Automation Products

The Customer
This MindTree client is a world leader in the storage lifecycle automation solutions to build, protect and manage corporate and personal computing environments. Its solutions are built on proven technology that simplify the management of the storage lifecycle and increase a company’s return on its storage investment. It has been honored with more than 200 awards for its software as well as its corporate reputation.

The Challenge
MindTree was selected to help the client in testing some of its Storage Lifecycle Automation products. In addition, MindTree took the responsibility of getting Microsoft Gold Certification and XP Design Logo Certification for one of the client’s products. Based on client’s needs, MindTree set up the infrastructure for the test environment. The complete test activities were carried out at MindTree’s Bangalore office in India.

The scope included:

• Broad level black box testing on different hardware and software platforms, functional testing and bug fixing
• Creating a combination matrix of hardware and software platforms to test various possible environments. Hardware platforms included different makes of desktops, enterprise workstations and servers. All versions of Windows were targeted including the Beta Version of 2003 Server.
• Following the rapid testing with exploratory testing methods and the specification based testing

Scripted testing

• Test plans were prepared including the combination matrix and test setup requirement as per project needs
• Test cases were prepared based on the feature list from the design documents and were inserted as part of the Test Matrix tool developed in-house. The tool captured the test cases and test results in a tabular way.

Exploratory testing

• Charters were allotted and sessions were planned for testers to explore with a mission of finding issues
• Deviations from general plan of attack was revisited when the exploration did not yield any issues

Test process

• A US FTP site was setup to facilitate uploading and downloading of builds in minimum time
• After receiving the build, sanity and regression testing were performed
• The test cases were executed as per the iteration notes, and the test results were submitted in the test matrix at the end of each week
• Defect Tracking Tool was used to report defects found during testing

Certification Approach

• Understood the requirements from the Microsoft specifications
• Defined a set of test cases to meet the certification needs in the product
• Executed the test cases, raised issues in bugtracker, and tracked all issues to closure

The Benefits

• Client’s product received Microsoft certifications as per schedule
• Client identified a valuable partner in MindTree and outsourced more products for testing and development