The Testing Blog

During many discussions that President Ronald Regan had with the Soviet Union regarding nuclear disarmament, he outlined his position very clearly with the phrase “Doveryai, No Proveryai – Trust, But Verify.” This important concept is the very basis of certification programs. Certification programs aren’t about lack of trust on the part of the standard group/alliance; rather, it’s an acknowledgment that even well-respected companies, that have developed many products based on the same specification over many years, may still have times in which their products don’t meet the standard.

As with any technology developed by a group and products developed by individual manufacturers interpreting that specification, it is highly probable that, left to themselves, individual products may not interoperate nor necessarily meet the spirit of the specification due to nuances in interpretation of the specification. If you don’t make sure, via certification, that your product is interoperable, you negate one of the very reasons that standards and alliance groups are formed in the first place – interoperability. One of consumers’ biggest gripes (about everything from wireless technologies to kid’s building blocks) is a lack of interoperability.

Although interoperability is certainly the most important reason for certifications, it isn’t the only reason. Certification programs are also valuable marketing tools to help manufacturers sell more products by proving interoperability to customers. Customers want to know that they can just pick up a box off a store shelf with a specific logo on it and know that it’ll work with other products they own using the same logo. Plus it provides name recognition for the standard/alliance. Products that “just work” lead consumers to come back and purchase other products that “just work” from the same standard over and over again. Even soccer moms know what common standards like USB are.

With the growing market place of competing products, technologies, and standards, now more ever, it is important to make sure that you get your products certified before they’re released.

MoCA (Multimedia Over Coax Alliance) is a standard that utilizes existing coaxial cable at homes for creating a home network for sharing digital multimedia contents among different location inside the home. The MoCA Alliance has established the MoCA certification testing program to insure the proper functionality of MoCA devices and verify their conformance with the MoCA specification.

There are three parts to MoCA certification testing:

1. First, MoCA vendors run the self test on their own product and once they feel comfortable about their device’s performance, the vendor will submit their device to the MoCA test house for certification testing. If you’re a MoCA member you can download the MoCA Certification Test Plan from the Members Site.
2. Second, the test house will then conduct the designated CORE testing, as outlined in the MoCA Certification Test Plan (MoCA-DEVICE-CTP V10 or V08 depending on if version 1.0 or 1.1 is being tested).
3. Finally, upon the successful completion of testing, the results are sent to the MoCA Alliance for final verification and issuance of the actual certification.

In addition to the certification testing, the MoCA certification test house is also capable of providing the pre-cert (self test) testing. This works well for those vendors that are short on staff and resources, or those that aren’t familiar with the necessary self-test validation. The test house provides other MoCA related services (debugging, spot checking, etc.) to address any testing needs prior to the vendor submitting for certification to assist the vendors in getting their products to the market faster.

Just a quick note, if you’re using MSXML (Microsoft XML Core Services), make sure you test and retest your installation routines. If your customers have upgraded to Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3, you may run into issues. As of SP3, Microsoft has placed MSXML under system protection so that applications/installations that try to update/remove MSXML fail. The most common occurrence of this has been with Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft has posted a work-around on their website. However, last thing you want to be doing is fielding support calls, emails, and tickets because of this issue. We just caught this testing another company’s product and thought we’d pass it along. Hopefully, Microsoft will help developers in handling this issue.

When you’re trying to test your website with many different web browsers, you often run into problems. In particular, Windows really isn’t designed to have multiple versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) installed at the same time. You could setup multiple platforms and maybe use a KVM to save space, but most of us don’t have the room for all that equipment just sitting around all the time.

As we mentioned in a previous post, a good solution to the issue is to setup multiple “virtual machines” (VMs) on your computer. Each VM has it’s own operating system and storage so you can install a version of Internet Explorer in each virtual machine. We also have previously discussed how you use VMs to learn how to use Linux and try out the various distributions (distros). Many of the distros already have pre-rolled VMs available (via VMware’s site or various image sites like this one for Virtual Box), but sometimes there’s that one distro you want to try without a VM. What do you do? Easy – roll your own.

Rather than going into the details of setting up your own VM, however, Lifehacker has a great article on how to setup, configure and install operating systems into a virtual machine using Virtual Box. Give it a read – it’s a very well done article!

If you’re performing testing on a Mac and looking for a simple application to ghost/image the hard drive, take a look at Carbon Copy Cloner. I know it seems like you should be able to just copy all the files to an external hard drive and just select it from the Startup Disk preference pane, but it doesn’t work in MacOS X. And, if you’re doing a lot of configuration testing, installation/uninstallation, etc., it would be really handy to have an identical copy of the hard drive, right? Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) to the rescue.

Just install CCC (or SuperDuper!) and you can clone a low-level copy of your internal hard drive to another partition or drive. It’s very handy, and if you really want a good backup, you can have it scheduled to update the cloned image so you’ll always have the latest version of all your hard drive files. When my hard drive suffered an unfortunate failure a few years ago, I had no worries – I had an identical copy of my hard drive all setup which allowed me to recover all my work on another Mac. It’s fast, accurate, and donation-ware so you can try it out before you buy.