Dell: PET: QA Automation Engineer: PET Tools: A Suite of Tools to Process HDD Images for Factory Installation

PET Overview

In order to image a factory system from a manufacturer such as Dell, the image must be reviewed and validated for hardware drivers, viruses, OS updates and hotfixes, and custom requirements based on customer selections during the ordering process.

A customer who needs 3000 laptops for a corporate refresh program can save considerably by leveraging the manufacturer's expertise and volume advantage for driving the image creation and validation process. While this is largely a completely automated process if one orders a unit from the online store, but for large coporate clients with complex systems configuration the process requires a hands on approach. A Client still must configure one unit, but once one system is ready, the image is sent over and PET takes it from there.

Basic Components:

• Customer Order, Tracker, and Configuration Management Tool
• Image Processing and Validation Tool
• Storage and Disaster Recovery

Basic Application Function

The image processing and validation tool was the application under development and its functions were as follows:

• Get Client/Project ID
• Select Services ( Virus Scan, Validate Image Drivers and OS requirements, Create Restore Media )
• Pull Image from Storage and Push to a worker bee VM from Virtual Machine Farm ("Drone")
• Drone expands image and performs services
• Drone captures HDD image via Ghost and push to Storage
• Disaster Recovery is call to backup the Project
• Update tracker applications along the way

Test iterations usually consisted of

• running an image through the system
• validating the image itself
• validating form data
• reviewing database data
• parsing logs
• autogenerated configuration data
• loading restore media on hardware or VMs

Tools

Many applications and tools were needed to get by:

• MS Office
• Microsoft Test Manager
• Team Foundation Server
• Visual Studio 2010/2012
• Microsoft SQL Manager Studio
• WinPE
• VMWare
• Norton Ghost
• MDT/Deployment Workbench
• QuickWeb
• Automation Framework
• SQL/EXCEL
• VS2012\Resharper
• FireFox (Firebug, Web Developer Tools)

Selenium Test Framework

• Functional/UAT Testing
• Regression Testing
• VS2012/C#
• Selenium 2 WebDriver
• XML/XLS backend/frontend