Testing times

I'm very excited about the upcoming Dev/Test Lab feature that's coming to preview soon in Azure.

A lot of time working in an agile team is spent working on testing. Even with a dedicated QA engineer, a moderate-major portion of any development work is spent writing tests, running tests, and just flat out checking that the stuff you've written works.

It's not always easy to do that just on your local workstation, even if you're lucky enough to have a stupidly powerful machine at your disposal (spoiler alert for employers: this really does make a difference :) )

On the other hand, you can't really have a bunch of test machines, with all the associated maintenance and other costs, available for the development team to use on a whim, or because the QA team are running extended regression tests on an earlier build.

Dev/Test Lab might just help with that.

There are a bunch of tools that can be used with public or private clouds to simplify the provisioning and deployment of virtual machines and - given that many production environments now run on similarly virtualised equipment - this is a very reasonable way to run your test environments. What really has my interest in this offering from Azure is the tooling around it - making it easy to bring up and shut down systems, as well as manage a team's budget. (Sadly, this is reality, and your managers don't tend to appreciate you racking up $50,000 in VM fees because you forgot to shut down the load test system before going on holiday).

So yeah - I'm very much looking forward to kicking the tires on the preview. I might even find time to write about it.