What is system tools daily test

Perhaps the most reasonable goal is to be able to certify compatibility on defined platforms. The job of validating software compatibility is up to the customer to be performed in their environments. With the widely diverse environments in use today, it's a safe bet to assume that each environment is unique at some point.

Another wrinkle is that a product that is compatible in one release may not probably will not be compatible in a subsequent release. Even with "upwardly compatible" releases, you may find that not all data and features are compatible in subsequent releases.

Finally, be careful to consider compatibility between users in your organization that are using varying release levels of the same product.

When you upgrade a product version, you need a plan that addresses:. Challenge 6 - Uncertain Upgrade Schedules and Quality. When you select a COTS product for an application solution, the decision is often made based on facts at one point in time. Although the current facts about a product are the only ones that are known and relevant during the acquisition process, the product's future direction will have a major impact in the overall return on investment for the customer.

The problem is that upgrade schedules fluctuate greatly, are impacted by other events such as new versions of operating systems and hardware platforms, and are largely unknown quantities in terms of quality. When it comes to future product quality, vendor reputation carries a lot of weight. Also, past performance of the product is often an indicator of future performance.

This should be a motivator for vendors to maintain high levels of product quality, but we find ourselves back at the point of understanding that as long as people keep buying the vendor's product at a certain level of quality, the vendor really has no reason to improve product quality except for competing with vendors of similar products. Keep open lines of communication with the vendor. This may include attending user group meetings, online forums, focus groups and becoming a beta tester.

Find out as much as you can about planned releases and:. Challenge 7 - Varying Levels of Vendor Support. Vendor support is often high on the list of acquisition criteria. However, how can you know for sure your assessment is correct?

The perception of vendor support can be a subjective one. Most people judge the quality of support based on one or a few incidents. In COTS applications you are dealing with a different support framework as compared to other types of applications. When you call technical support, the technician may not differentiate between a Fortune customer vs. Furthermore, when you find defects and report them to the vendor, there is no guarantee they will be fixed, even in future releases of the product.

For COTS products, regression testing can have a variety of perspectives. One perspective is to view a new release as a new version of the same basic product.

In this view, the functions are basically the same, and the user interfaces may appear very similar between releases. Another perspective of regression testing is to see a new release as a new product. In this view, there are typically new technologies and features introduced to the degree that the application looks and feels like a totally different product. The goal of regression testing is to validate that functions work correctly as they did before an application was changed.

For COTS, this means that the product still meets your needs in your environment as it did in the previous version used. Although the functions may appear different at points, the main concerns are that:. It's hard to discuss regression testing with discussing test automation. Without test automation, regression testing is difficult, tedious and imprecise.

However, test automation of COTS products is challenging due to:. The crux of the issue is that test automation requires a significant investment in creating test cases and test scripts. The only ways to recoup the investment are:. While it is possible that a defect may be found in the regression testing of a COTS product that may carry a high potential loss value, the more likely types of defects will be found in other forms of testing and will relate more to integration, interoperability, performance, compatibility, security and usability factors rather than correctness.

This leaves us with a ROI based on repeatability of the automated tests. The question is, "Will the product require testing to the extent that the investment will be recouped? If you are planning to test only one or two times per release, probably not. However, if you plan to use automated tools to test product performance on a variety of platforms, or to just test the correctness of installation, then you may well get a good return on your automation investment.

For the scope concern, much of the problem arises from the inability to identify effective test cases. Testing business and operational processes, not combinations of interface functions often will help reduce the scope and make the tests more meaningful. Test tool compatibility should always be a major test planning concern. Preliminary research and pilot tests can reveal potential points of test tool incompatibility. Challenge 9 - Interoperability and Integration Issues. When dealing the spider web of application interfaces and the subsequent processing on all sides of the interfaces, the complexity level of testing interoperability becomes quite high.

Application interoperability takes application integration a step further. While integration addresses the ability to pass data and control between applications and components, interoperability addresses the ability for the sending and receiving applications to use the passed data and control to create correct processing results.

It's one thing to pass the data, it's another thing for the receiving application to use it correctly. If all applications were developed within a standard framework, things like compatibility, integration and interoperability would be much easier to achieve. However, there is a tradeoff between standards and innovation. As long as rapid innovation and time-to-market are primary business motivators, standards are not going to be a major influence on application development.

Some entities, such as the Department of Defense, have developed environments to certify applications as interoperable with an approved baseline before they can be integrated into the production baseline. This approach achieves a level of integration, but limits the availability of solutions in the baseline.

Other organizations have made large investments in interoperability and compatibility test labs to measure levels of interoperability and compatibility. However, the effort and expense to build and maintain test labs can be large. In addition, you can only go so far in simulating environments where combinations of components are concerned.

Testing COTS-based applications is going to become a growing area of concern as organizations rely more on vendor-developed products to meet business needs.

Just because a vendor develops the product does not relieve the customer from the responsibility of testing to ensure the product will meet user and business needs.

In addition, the product may work in some environments but not others. Testing COTS products relies heavily on validation, which seeks to determine the correctness and fitness of use based on real-world cases and environments as opposed to documented specifications.

Although aspects of the COTS product may be described in business needs and acquisition criteria, many tests of the product will likely be based in a customer's daily work processes. The bottom line is that successfully testing COTS products is possible, but requires a different view of risk, processes, people and tools. Randy's book, Surviving the Top Ten Challenges of Software Testing , will help you solve some of your toughest testing problems: people problems! Now in Kindle format!

Click on the image to buy it from Amazon. The summary will also tell you about the apps which are taking a lot of memory. For troubleshooting, check which system is being used more than usual. For example, if the disk is being choked, go to the Disk details section below and check which files and processes are using the most disk time.

The disk breakdown will tell you which processes are consuming the most disk. If you have specific requirements, you can also create custom reports in Performance Monitor. To create a custom report, you will need to create a custom data collector set. They can easily run the performance report while user is working on his or her computer and then see what is actually going wrong.

If you are in a Microsoft domain network, the performance monitor can also be run on remote computers. Log In Create Account. Abstract Contents About the Author. Implementing an ERP system is huge endeavor with a big impact on your company. It is vital that you test the ERP system throughout the implementation to ensure it will function properly and meet the intended business goals. Find out what is involved in ERP testing and how to do it properly. Types of ERP Testing.

ERP testing is a quality assurance QA process designed to ensure the ERP system is correctly implemented and operational before the full launch.