Creating a Software Testing Environment Using FreeBSD

Chris McMahon

$FreeBSD: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/wp-toolbox/article.xml 39632 2012-10-01 11:56:00Z gabor $

$FreeBSD: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/wp-toolbox/article.xml 39632 2012-10-01 11:56:00Z gabor $

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A slightly altered version of this paper was first published in the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference Proceedings, 2005.

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Table of Contents
1 Overview
2 The Challenge
3 The FreeBSD Solution
4 Conclusion

1 Overview

From late 2003 until early 2005, I was a tester in an all-Windows® environment. Although unlikely on the face of it, FreeBSD became a valuable test tool platform in that context. FreeBSD contains useful and powerful applications for any tester in any environment.

Unlike Linux, FreeBSD is a single monolithic project, rather than a collection of disparate parts assembled into a distribution. And the most attractive part of FreeBSD for a software tester is the FreeBSD Ports Collection—a very large, managed set of software applications with a single, simple, and uniform installation procedure.

This paper describes several software test tools from the FreeBSD Ports Collection that I used to test software and systems in an all-Windows environment.

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    The Challenge