Virtual Vagabond

The old excuse for broken products – “Well, it works for me!” – should have become obsolete among software developers, at the latest, with the invention of virtual machines.

On a bare-metal, virtual distribution, you can easily install any software suite in a reproducible way to discover whether or not the entire system will work for the customer in the future. To automate this testing, the developer needs a command-line tool to boot the virtual machine, a setup tool to install the application packages and their dependencies, and a script to launch the test suite. Often applications span multiple instances – such as a client that contacts a web server, which in turn uses a database instance.