The ultimate goals of any software-testing effort is to make the software more robust and reliable, thereby reducing support costs and increasing customer satisfaction. Recent trends to use unit testing and other techniques in the software build process help reach those goals. However with the move towards systems of interacting services, full-scale system tests are critical, yet are rarely done as systematically or completely as unit tests because of the large manual effort required to deploy a full-scale system and run the tests. Six2 provides a framework, using cloud computing, to automate the deployment of a complete set of services for tests, running those tests, collecting results, and tearing down the test deployment. Using the dynamic pool of resources that clouds provide allows the automatic, low-cost deployment of test configurations. This presentation briefly presents the need for automated full-scale system tests; it continues with an explanation of the technical aspects of using cloud computing to provide a framework for these types of tests and a summary of early results. The presentation will also discuss sociological issues, exposed in the ETICS/EGEE experience, that impact the implementation of an effective testing regime. The Third Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC), Seattle, WA, Oct. 23rd and 24th. Speaker: Marc-Elian Begin
