Jean Hartmann, Microsoft
The Office Productivity Suite including applications, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, has now been available for Windows PCs and Apple Macintoshes for many years. During these years, the respective product and test code bases have grown significantly, with increasing numbers of features being added and requiring validation. When validating PC-based products, testers leveraged some of the benefits of the Windows platform including the availability of the .NET framework to implement their tests using managed programming languages. For test execution, they used Windows-supported mechanisms, such as COM/RPC, to communicate in- and out-of-process with the application under test. Thus, when teams needed to deliver related Office products on a different platform, such as the Apple Macintosh, test teams were faced with a dilemma – either attempt to port test cases, together with the required test infrastructure, or create new tests using the platform-preferred development/test environment. Both were time-consuming.
With the advent and rapid evolution of mobile platforms, such strategies are becoming more difficult to justify – implementing test suites from scratch is just too costly and slow. New test strategies, tools and processes are needed that promote the construction of portable tests and test libraries and enable testers to quickly retarget a given test case for different platforms and devices. This approach is particularly valuable when validating the common or ‘core’ application logic of each Office product for different platforms and devices, resulting in a more consistent level of quality for core functionality. It also gives test teams more time to focus on validating those product features that are unique to a specific platform or device.
This paper chronicles our ongoing exploration of platform-agnostic testing strategies during the current shipping cycle. It highlights the challenges that we have faced so far and attempts to illustrate and emphasize key concepts of our work using examples.
Jean Hartmann, 2011 Technical Paper, Abstract, Paper, Slides
