Quality Assurance at Reactive Software
On every program page we give the following statement:
We test our products thoroughly on different environments and with different versions of software to deliver the highest possible quality to our customers. Your satisfaction is guaranteed!
This post will explain what this really means in terms of physical work and how we manage to do it.
Planning
We plan for a new set of tests once a new version of the supported program comes out. E.g. when new major version of Trillian comes out, we install it, add several accounts with the passwords and test it with the latest version of Password Recovery for Trillian.
As mentioned in some of the earlier posts we do an out-of-plan investigation if we get the same report twice from the two customers in the same week about the recovery tool failing to recover saved passwords from a program.
Operating systems
Most of the users online still use Windows XP and hence this is the primary operating system we test in. Vista was so unsuccessful that very few people actually use it. As opposed to that, Windows 7, the latest version from Microsoft is very good. Many people like it and plan to migrate to it. Hence the second environment we test in is Windows 7. Windows Vista and Windows 7 are based on the same code and both systems work in the same way. All paths are similar too. This means that if the program passes the tests in Windows 7, it will most likely work in Windows Vista.
In order to facilitate a set of operating systems with clean environments, we use virtualization to host all the operating systems on one machine and have them pure and clean for every new test.
With Sun Virtual Box it’s easy to host and manage everything in one place:
You can either continue with the current state or revert back to the snapshot. Our snapshots have all the latest updates installed.
Software update/issue rectification
If we discover bugs or cases when our software is not finding the passwords that should have been discovered, it is time to research into the reasons and roll-out a new version after fixing.
We’re quite strict on our promise: we do indeed refund money when the password is not found due to the limitation in our software.