QA and Automation

At Calsoft the QA process for a new product release starts with the Product Requirements Document created by architectural team from the Market Requirements Document. This early focus on QA gives us insights into the product needs and expectations.

We provide comprehensive QA services ranging from manual testing to automated testing and from functional testing to regression and performance testing. We have successfully executed QA and SIV projects in many diverse areas for our clients, from testing systems software to applications with a special focus in testing storage-related products.

Here is a brief overview of our testing experience in the systems space:

Automated test suite for VMware's virtual machine product range
The project involved providing a series of Automated tests capable of performing correctness as well as stress / regression testing for VMware's virtual machine product suite. We delivered a test suite that was capable of testing the functionality of various subsystems, such as Networking, User Interface, Disk Subsystem, etc, of the VMware virtual machine.

This greatly reduced VMware's Quality Assurance workload and enabled faster and more complete testing of newer releases of the product suite.

Regression test suite for a Distributed Lock Manager
This was done as part of the MCS project for HP Storage Division, where we developed an Operating System that controlled a NUMA machine where each node ran a local copy of Windows NT. This part of the project required building a test suite for the Global Lock Manager (GLM) for the Global File System component of our OS. The objective of the test-suite was to enable kernel component owners to write test scripts, which looked like shell scripts, instead of writing kernel code for test purposes. Furthermore, these test cases needed to be completely reproducible.

Our test infrastructure allowed the test writer to create multiple threads on different MCS nodes, and start multiple threads within each process. A single process acted as the controller, and passed a stream of commands to target threads – command status was processed synchronously, which gave our test suite the ability to give developers reproducible test cases to isolate bugs.

Testing tool for a cluster file system
The aim of the project was to design a testing tool for DirectNFS – a cluster file system designed and developed by Calsoft for HP Research Labs. It was intended to provide both micro and macro level testing by allowing testers to generate load from multiple machines, and to generate custom/random File I/O patterns. The tool was designed as a distributed program, with a master node controlling several load-generating slave nodes. I/O patterns were generated as a sequence of File System calls, with the proper constraint checks in place to ensure generation of valid sequences. A logging and verification subsystem was also added to enable post-processing of test results.

Test suite for an FC storage switch 
The aim of the project was to develop a test suite for a fiber channel switch to test its I/O path. Additionally, the goal was to give the tester the ability to test management commands that could be sent to the switch. The test suite involved development of a pseudo FC-HBA adapter, a Random Script generator, a SCSI command shell and a SCSI target emulator. The Random Script generator was used to generate programs that would in turn generate a large number of SCSI commands for the switch. A verifier module would compare the result of these commands against those that were  correct. The pseudo FC-HBA adapter served as the communication interface between Linux hosts and the switch. The SCSI command shell provided a GUI interface for testing the switch, while the SCSI target emulator allowed us to test the switch's outbound  I/O path.

Test Harness for a cluster file system to test NTFS compatibility
We have developed a test harness for the Polyserve cluster file system (PSFS) to test NTFS compatibility. This involved porting a Linux version of Polyserve's existing test harness (BundleTest) to Windows using the Cygwin libraries for testing POSIX interfaces. We also added libraries to test Win32 file system APIs, Native APIs and other Win2k-specific APIs  which were not supported by BundleTest. Additionally, we enhanced the test suite for testing NTFS specific file operations such as,  open by file identifier, multiple hard links, unicode file name,  byte range locks, oplocks, share mode locks, directory change notifications and memory mapped files under Windows.

Apart from our QA experience with the client projects, Calsoft has developed its own suite of software products for storage vendors to carry out testing more >>

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