Compatibility Testing determines if your solution can be used in different computing environments - various combinations of operating systems, browsers, third-party software, and hardware platforms.

Since your customers use a wide range of browsers, software versions, display resolutions, and overall configuration settings, you need to make sure that your product operates well in all intended environments.

Every computing environment is characterized by a set of hardware and software capabilities, and your application can be tested for compatibility with each of them, including but not limited to:

• Computing capacity of a hardware platform (IBM 360, HP 9000, etc.)
• Bandwidth-handling capacity of networking hardware
• Included peripherals (Printer, DVD drive, etc.)
• Operating systems (Windows, UNIX, MVS, etc.)
• Databases (Oracle, Sybase, DB2, etc.)
• Browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Netscape, etc.)
• Third-party applications (desktop and web solutions, office software and payment systems, etc.)

The scope of testing, level of support, and list of browsers, OSs, servers, versions, etc., are individually determined for each project.

Cross-Browser Testing

Many web products are designed for broad adoption, often in international markets, and they must operate correctly on various browsers. Cross-browser testing is carried out to ensure that:

• Users have the same visual experience, regardless of the browsers through which they view the web application.
• The application behaves and responds identically in terms of functionality across different browsers.

A1QA provides cross-browser testing for the most popular and widely used browser versions. The version list is continuously updated and can be narrowed or extended according to the project requirements. Among them are:

• Windows browsers: IE 6.0 - 8.0, Opera 9.5 - 9.6, Firefox 2.0 - 3.0, Google Chrome 1.0 - 2.0
• Mac OS browsers: Safari 2.0 - 3.2, Firefox 2.0 - 3.0
• Linux/Unix browsers: Firefox 2.0 - 3.0, Konqueror 3.5 - 4.2

Cross-Platform Testing

Cross-platform testing is used to ensure the quality of the end product when working under different types, versions and locales of operating systems and to guarantee seamless functioning of the application. Even different versions of service packs for Microsoft products can dramatically change the behavior of the end product, so cross-platform testing is of the utmost importance. Other operating systems also have a variety of versions that should be checked for the support of the end product. To maximize the coverage of cross-platform testing A1QA provides full hardware support of 32-bit and 64-bit operating environments.

A1QA performs cross-platform testing on the following operating systems:

• Microsoft: Windows NT/98/ME/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/Seven
• Mac OS: 10.4 Tiger, 10.5 Leopard
• Linux-based: Debian, SlackWare, uBuntu, SuSE, Red Hat, Mandriva, Fedora Core
• Unix-based: FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD

All the operating systems mentioned above run on physical PCs or virtual machines with the use of technologies provided by VMware and Virtual PC solutions. Today, we offer a wide variety of virtual machines - more than 150! - for these operating systems, with various combinations of locales (English, Spanish, German, Russian, Polish, Italian, French, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Danish, Swedish, Portuguese, Norwegian), service packs, and other software.

A1QA benefits:

• We have extensive expertise in compatibility testing of web and standalone software.
• We provide expert evaluation and consulting on the necessary computing environment with regard to the application type, target audience, and region.
• We offer an optimized approach, thanks to the use of special testing tools and the optimum combination of classic and innovative methodologies, to provide an effective testing strategy.
• We use a wide array of predefined configurations.  We focus on customer needs and flexibility in building an extended list of browsers, OS, hardware, etc. 
• We use real test environments, together with virtual systems.
• We ensure the quick execution of compatibility tests before each product release, without overloading or growing the QA team.

See featured case studies on compatibility testing.

Contact A1QA for a free consultation in the compatibility testing domain.