Really good advice here from David (who I may nickname the "exterminator" he's helped me turn up so many bugs lately!).
Chip -----Original Message----- From: David [mailto:trailerda...@hotmail.com] Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2014 1:18 AM To: gw-scripting@gwmicro.com Subject: Benefitting From a "Test-User" Profile To all of you programmers, As you well know, developing an app from scratch, includes a whole lot of testing and bug fixing. Many times, it even is not until the moment you are attempting to install (or update) the app, as would the end-user, that you discover some of the bugs. There is a few ways to do this kind of testing. Some developers have more than one computer, doing the development on one, test-running on the other. This could particularly be of benefit, should you have computers with different flavors of Windows, or otherwise differently set up environment. Other developers, decide to have one version - their developed and already installed version - running on their computer, and soon as it seem to do what they want, push it out the door. Then, they will grab a cup of coffee, and await whatever comes for feedback from the end-user. Smile,. I am not going to tell what approach should be taken, in any given case. Especially when your app is a pretty simple project, with a straight forward installation and operation, the Quick-Push method may well work. On more complex projects, perhaps the stuff may benefit from a bit more in-house testing. At least, it may save you some extra hazzle later on. The good news, is that the screen reader of Window--Eyes, does hold a feature that we well may apply here. That is the feature of letting you set up several independent user profiles. This is all done from the WE Control Panel, takes only a few minutes, and holds many benefits for you as a developer. i have greatly enjoyed this kind of multi-user environment, when developing my app projects. The first benefit you have, is that you can run your developing project in a secondary user profile. Should anything go wrong, and your screen reader halts, you can simply restart the screen reader, and be back in your main user profile, and do your normal work undisturbed by messy coding in your project. Whenever you are ready to fix your code, or add new features to your app, you will switch to the developing user profile, and can continue your work there. Secondly, you can have a dedicated user profile, specially set aside for test-running your WEPM file, just before you upload it. In this profile, you can remove oldeter versions of your app, pretending to be a new user. You can run the WEPM file on top of an existing installation, pretending to be an end-user who updates. And, you can - upon request - create an environment with a given set of apps installed, similar to what a user reports is the case on his computer. Thereby, without disturbing your screen reader's main functionality found in the main profile, you can give your app a pretty good stress test, and may be able to trace the reason why things malfunction on other computers. Thirdly, you can have a dedicated profile, where you keep the previous version of your app code running. If, on a later state, users are reporting some kind of trouble, that they claim was not the case with the previous version of your project, you can quickly switch to the "old version" profile, and give it all a test. App developers, why not create a handful profiles, and do more of your testing in this kind of an environment. Personally, I like to have at least three profiles on my computer, and may name them something like: MAIN, the profile I run daily, and where only final versions (downloaded from app central) runs. DEVELOPMENT, the profile wherein I do all my projecting and basic testing. TEST-USER, the profile where I try to pretend being the first-time or updating end-user, and where I do my test running of any WEPM file just prior to uploading. As I said, you could have a fourth profile, name it ""Previous", and keep your previous version of the code there. Even, if you like, you could have a separate profile for each of your projects in development, and thereby easily switch between the different profiles, depending on which app you currently want to show some attention. Benefit hereof is, that you can work in a "protected" environment, with strict focus on your current app, not disturbing yourself with lacking coding of the other apps you have in process. Finally, I want to tell you all, there is available an app from app central, that easily let's you switch between all your user profiles in WE. At the moment, I am unable to remember the name, but it starts with the letter Z, so should be no trouble to find it. Don't let the non-English name scare you. The app is quick and easy to set up, and will let you switch profiles with a simple set of hotkeys. -- David
