Background

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.

When first assigned a feature to develop test cases for, I like to 'stake out the perimeter' before putting anything to ink. I created an XLS workbook for getting all ideas into one place and getting organized and as data comes in, it gets piped to the document. Half the battle in QA is knowing what questions to ask and 'knowing what you don't know'. If your first act is to start writing test cases - you'll be wasting time updating them in the near future. Being the product of an investigation, test cases should come last and ideally should be well written up front.

The RAIL - Rolling Action Items List

Here's a classic example of testing BIOS features. This was a very 'hands on' role as BIOS testing new features is very much an exploratory effort with each feature usually having a specific tool to dump data for verification purposes. With each test, the protocol and storage parameters needed to be learned and documented for later use. Working on the latest offerings means there wasn't a substantial amount of tools available for automation.  In this case, the component is used for verifying a Genuine OS is installed on the target system. This would be injected by the OEM manufacturer and when the OA30 feature was enabled on the system it will not boot an OS with another ID. The first issues was a build configuration issue. The second was a payload missing issue. On the third attempt everything worked as designed.

OA30-MSDM.bin: ACPI MSDM Table Breakdown

ACPI Table / MSDM Payload

eBIOS is a compiler tool for AMI and Compal BIOS released and is used for integrating custom features into the BIOS source tree. In order to test new features and fixes specific to Dell product line, they first needed to be integrated into the source tree. Components were added, verified, built, verified again, then flashed into the system by one of several means. Many times the code needed to be injected into removable BIOS chips using 'DediProg' as the BIOS could get into a bad state where flashing from the laptop was impossible. Below is a short walkthrough of the eBIOS application.

Opening a BIOS project