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Work is getting busier.  The project that I test is about to drop a new version in two weeks.  This means that I'm putting in longer hours to focus on the various tasks needed to ensure a quality product.  Not having a better topic de jour, I thought that this would be a great opportunity to describe some of what I do at work.

I am a software tester.  I've been a software tester in one form or another for 26 years.  This means I generally know how to test.  This includes Test Planning, Test Creation & Documentation, and Test Execution.  Fairly straight forward stuff.  One hurdle is the product cluster that I am testing.  Lenovo Cloud Deploy has several elements, including a web front end, a server based database, as well as a windows application.

The website allows management of users and system licensing.  The application provides a method to manage O/S deployments and perform the actual deployments, either to the computer that is running the application, or another computer.  The database on the server keeps track of everything.

A deployment involves installing a custom O/S onto a system.  The process I normally go through is to create an image (using another tool), load the image as a deployment using the application, creating USB media to deploy to another computer, Then booting the (other) computer using the media.  The application then runs in Windows PE or RE, erasing the hard disk, and then writes the deployment to the system.  For a typical run, the process might take an hour to four hours, depending on how laggy the network is at the moment.  Working in a lab environment means that network bandwith is a shared resource, and there are hundreds of computers running in the lab.

At the present time, there are about 750 test scripts in the test case library.  Each is composed of from 1 to 10 tests, depending on the test subject.  Fortunately, our team uses automation to test some of these tests... at least on the Website and the Windows application.  A small percentage of the tests (~10%) are not automatable, and the Windows PE/RE side is totally manual testing.  A typical regression will last at least a couple of weeks.  Since we are releasing in little more than this, it is crunch time.

The job gets a little stressful when we're under the gun, but the bulk of the time it is fairly laid back.  I enjoy the work.  Although I am creeping toward retirement ago, my current plan is to push on until 70.  

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