On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 8:10 AM, Alan Wilson <[email protected]> wrote: > > Good morning Rob, > > I have completed Intro to QA Level 3. Do you recommend using VirtualBox for > testing? >
Hi Alan, You don't need a virtual PC environment to start QA work, but it can be very useful. I've used VirtualBox and VMWare. The advantage of a virtualized test environment is the easy ability to switch from from configuration to another. So my main test machine runs Windows 7 64-bit. But I have virtual machines for clean installs of Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. I also have virtual machines with current and older versions of OpenOffice installed. So I can quickly bring up a machine with any of these configurations to confirm a bug report. I also have a range of Linux VM's. But note that most bugs we receive are functionality-related and not dependent on the fine details of the configuration. For those bugs any stable installation of the latest OpenOffice is fine. But for install/upgrade-related or platform-dependent bugs, virtual machines are a huge time-saver. Another benefit is that this isolates your test environment from your working environment. This might not be a big deal if you use a PC only for testing. But if, like me, you do email and general work on the same machine you testing, using virtual machines is a good idea. For example, I never need to worry about instabilities in a snapshot build of OpenOffice causing problems for my working environment, or causing document corruption, etc. Regards, -Rob > Thank you, > > Alan >
