Xiudong Fei & Sira Rao, Microsoft
Developing and testing an application hosted in a sandbox environment presents unique challenges. Development and testing agility is slowed down when validating such applications in production environment. Production environments are complex, have restricted permissions for modifying and using the environment, are costly in terms of deployment and upgrades, and make it difficult for applications to capture relevant logging information and troubleshoot in real-time. To test such applications in production, the problems are aggravated when trying to validate implementation changes, gather information such as logs or if there is a need to troubleshoot the application at runtime as it would require updating the binaries on the back-end or performing in-process debugging by the developer. These problems are also observed when the Test and Ops teams need to deploy test environments to validate the application. Repeatedly setting up test environments is costly and it is hard to simulate a true production environment. All of these constraints slow product development, testing, troubleshooting and thereby delay achieving quality levels needed for release.
This paper introduces a detour concept for an application that is hosted in a sandbox environment. We share the experience of validating the Lync Web application in the context of a Silverlight sandbox environment. In this paper we discuss the tool and framework created to address the above mentioned challenges. We also discuss how we used this tool to intercept Silverlight binaries, modify them and re-direct this to a browser session that hosts the application under test. Additionally, the tool can remotely manipulate objects in the Silverlight application through the use of scripts. With the objects available at hand, we can programmatically manipulate them for out-of-process mode debugging and also use this mechanism as alternate UI automation framework. The tool can be used to enable logging, inflate log size and for product error handling and security testing through fault injection. Using this tool in test and production environments and based on cost of deploying simple test environments, we conservatively estimate a savings of two person-days per month. The paper concludes with lessons learned by our team throughout the development and deployment of this tool, and includes information on practices other teams can implement to achieve similar results.
Xiudong Fei & Sira Rao, 2011 Technical Paper, Abstract, Paper, Slides
