The meeting with the testers about the questionnaire went ahead on Tuesday. It lasted about 20 mins and I think both sides got some thing from it.

I started with a quick run down of what I’m doing to make sure that we were saying the same thing, then I moved onto looking at the questionnaire with them. This was a very good exercise as I was able to get a better understanding of what they actually do and how they actually test. My first surprise was that they don’t really test in as many operating systems as I thought, generally only XP with a splattering of 2000.

Besides getting some information from them about what they do and what I was going to do for them, I also had to get somebody to test the new environment. One member of the team volunteered which makes life much easier all round.

The results have been put into a spreadsheet but I now need to make sense of them, not sure how I’ll do that just yet but I’ll look at past analysis that I’ve done on questionnaires and see if I can get any ideas from that.

VMware produce a product that they call VMware ACE, you can visit their web site for more details but the main point of this product is to package environments into an installer. Apart from the time helping to install a few servers the rest of the afternoon was spent downloading, installing and using it. Not sure if I’ll suggest it in this context as you loose quite a bit of flexibility, but it’s still a good product.