Testing Testing, 1, 2, 3, 45678...

As one of the first consultants to work with a client, I'll sometimes get questions about testing approaches with SDL Tridion. I've served as a business analyst before and have done light testing, but the Tridion-related answer for testing really depends on what you mean by testing.

For example, I once had a research prompt to find performance monitoring and testing tools for my previous .NET teams and found out the following challenges.

• IT Operations "testing" focuses on bandwidth, packets sniffing, and a more appliance approach. They want to get insight on the stability of systems.
• Developers are focused on personal toolkits of sorts. They can purchase such tools almost out of pocket and are easily approved through a PO, signed by a manager. Think "shrinkwrap" like the options from RedGate.

But this is only a performance subset of "testing" and it's doesn't necessarily focus on stress or load testing.

Example SDL Tridion Sandbox Proposal

I've written about Custom Training, the "sixth" SDL Tridion environment. But I almost forgot that I created a mock plan for such an environment as part of a course project before joining SDL back in 2010.

See the document below for a modified submission for a Web Design class I took at University of Phoenix four years ago. We were encouraged to submit projects that reflected our jobs and this demonstrated things I knew (and didn't know) about Web development and SDL Tridion (R5.3 at the time). I got somethings right and others not quite right.

Got Right

I got some things right like project documentation basics including an informal project plan, problem statement, and objective. I had an informal concept of personas by describing developers and management as the "target audience" for this mock proposal.

I included a content inventory of sorts under a section called pages and suggest separating design, content, and functionality concerns.

There's both a simple wireframe and a sitemap documenting the example site and even some notes on accessiblity, copyright, and source control based on research projects and things I've learned as an "IT professional."

I described "page types" without actually calling them page types.

Four years later and it still looks like a typical wireframe. The example screenshots are a bit dated though.

Not Quite Right