Regression Testing

Software testing can be a thankless job. It's always at the tail end of the development cycle, and the pressure to hurry and release the product is phenomenal. As you know, there are many types of testing throughout the development cycle. There are standard feature tests, scalability tests, pathological condition tests and testing of all the bugs that showed up so far. A tester not only needs a good size lab for this, but also needs to set up different network configurations and network conditions for every test.

How many hours have you spent trying to reproduce and recreate the same test environments time after time in order to perform tests on each new release? MIMIC makes regression tests a snap by helping to create and save different network scenarios. It can produce a specified test scenario with a Tcl/Tk or Perl script. These tests can be run again as many times as necessary with minimal setup. Every time there is a new feature or a bug you want to test, you can add a new scenario to your regression tests. In addition, the scripts you create can include the network topology combined with various actions. Here are some examples of the kinds of tests you can perform:

Scenario 1: This could be as simple as one Cisco router with multiple interfaces and a certain (high-low) traffic pattern;
Scenario 2: You could test for scalability with a network populated with devices from a single vendor, i.e. 1,000 Cisco devices;
Scenario 3: You could test for scalability with a heterogeneous network populated with devices from multiple vendors;
Scenario 4: You could create a scenario with multiple device failures that would generate a trap storm.
Scenario 5: You can test for a certain bug in the management application found in the previous releases.
And so on …

All this can be done without running around the lab and worrying if all the devices are configured properly. Imagine the time this would save in the testing procedure! In addition, these scripts can be shared between developers and testers, so that the unit tests that developers perform can be transferred to regression tests. Another benefit is that your sales force can also use some of the scripts in order to demo the effectiveness of your management software under some of these conditions.
With MIMIC, the scope of regression testing can be significantly enhanced. Testing proceeds faster, and companies can have higher confidence in the level of software testing, and software products can be released to customers more quickly. And in this way companies can win the time-to-market battle with the competition while assuring a high level of quality!

MIMIC includes a library of scripts and pre-configured multi-vendor networks. Some of the networks are recorded from Networld+Interop trade shows, which have true large-scale, multi-vendor networks.

If you would like to share how you are benefiting from MIMIC or if there is an aspect of MIMIC that you would like discussed, please let us know at marketing@gambitcomm.com.