The trials and thrills of system testing [2013-07-01]
It’s possible that not everyone’s pulse races when thinking about system testing, but that was the exciting culmination of our weekend here at Reneal IEO. We set up 12 used laptops contributed by generous donors and connected them through a gigabit network switch to a server with Neal’s latest-and-greatest integrated software based around Xubuntu 12.04. This hardware and software is all heading to Tanzania in August, so it was important to test the full-up system to see how it behaves with heavy user loading.
Neal did the hardware setup Thursday and Friday. We had some Ethernet cables on hand, but there were a number of them that he fabricated himself. He has already taught many people in the Philippines and Tanzania how to fab their own cables, and one of the items on our standard packing list is an Ethernet crimping tool and RJ45 connectors that we always leave behind with an IT teacher. Making Ethernet cables is much cheaper than buying them, so it’s been a very useful skill to share with others.
Saturday we brainstormed the test matrix. We identified a number of specific activities to test (opening a large PDF, opening and saving a large LibreOffice Impress file, playing the educational TuxType and TuxMath games, watching local and internet movies with VLC, watching a flash file, and generic web searching with two different browsers). We wanted to test features of both the teacher accounts (password protected with individual file storage space) and student accounts (refreshed to their original state upon logout). Performance both for individual machines and for massive simultaneous loads was also on the list. All this led to a 37-step test matrix. We also made up multiple identities for our testers, who would be handling two laptops each during the testing. This led to fictitious names like “Luigi Skarface” and “Downy Skallion” (Luigi and Downy – you know who you are!).
Sunday morning found Neal still making final touches on the test configuration. I labeled the laptops and prepped the data sheets for the testers. In keeping with tradition in the Philippines, I also prepared many snacks.
Our test crew arrived late Sunday afternoon: my work colleague and friend Dawn, her husband Steve, and their kids Jen, Leigh, and Stevie. We got them set up and the testing began. We ran into an early snag with student accounts (files weren’t being saved to the correct folders), but we still were able to test numerous applications with the student accounts. The kids were clever at thinking up things to try to challenge the internet site blocking, most of which got them the expected “stop sign” on the screen. TuxMath and TuxType worked extremely well, and we had to ask our testers to turn their sound down as they blasted away at arithmetic and algebra problems that threatened to destroy civilization if unanswered. The LibreOffice applications also dazzled with their speed. During snack time, Neal raced to rebuild accounts and debug the issues our testers had uncovered. The teacher accounts worked perfectly, allowing our testers to save files to their own personal accounts but also share files in the “Teachers Shared” folder. On the flip side, simultaneous spawning of VLC on multiple clients to watch movies did not work well.
A pizza dinner marked completion of the testing. While Neal wasn’t completely satisfied with how the system worked, we were certainly thrilled to have a list of problems to work now rather than on-site in Tanzania in August. Within 24 hours, he had already fixed the student account file saving and also discovered that multiple video streams run well if they have slightly staggered starts. Reneal IEO would like to send out a huge THANK YOU to our very energetic and competent test crew!
Each of these used laptops was on its way to being recycled when instead, it ended up with a new life as a donation to Reneal IEO. In a matter of just a few weeks, these laptops will have students and teachers at Paroma Secondary School in Musoma Tanzania sitting in front of them. I can already imagine hearing the exact same laughter and excitement that we heard yesterday, as those kids at Paroma take aim at math problems raining down and explore for the first time the new world that a computer can open up.
Because of the client-server architecture, even very old computers can change lives in developing countries. Minimum specifications for used computers can be found here. Let us know at contact.reneal@gmail.com if you’d like to explore a donation.