How to automate installer testing
automated-tests, installation, unit-testing, virtualization
Solution
We have created a set of VMs and find it is very easy to manage. We run the tests for 13 different Windows installers over night. The VMs we have created our very bare bones, so it is possible to run a number of tests in parallel.
Problem
I'm wondering if anyone has any best practices for automating the testing of installers on various machines with potentially different hardware / software profiles and by specifying various options to the installer. The idea would be that I could write "unit test like" code to set up a machine, run the installer, then test that certain things are true. Tests might look similar to: ``` Test: Boot Machine without IIS Run Installer Assert Installer Had Errors Test: Boot Machine with IIS Run Installer Assert Installer Ran Test_Fixture: SetUp: Boot Machine with IIS Test: Run Installer without IIS install Assert Website Not Installed Test: Run Installer with IIS install Assert Website Installed ``` I know I could create lots of VMs, but waiting for a VM to boot for each functional test sounds like way more work than I want. What I really want is a way to virtualize the installer environment. Any suggestions?