Creating a test environment for Mac software

My company develops commercial Mac software. Our flagship product runs on OS X 10.6.8+. We want to improve our software quality with better and more comprehensive testing.

What hardware and OS's should we supply our tester with? My thought so far is either a Mac Mini or an iMac with an SSD, lots of RAM, and either Parallels or VMWare so that he can run OS X 10.6.8, OS X 10.7, OS X 10.8, OS X 10.9, and OS X 10.10 in virtual machines.

Is this feasible? Recommended? I'd love to hear your feedback.

Solution 1:

I use VMWare Fusion Professional for software testing. Virtual machines make regression testing and replay of problems wonderfully easy.

I run a copy of VMWare Fusion on my older Mac Pro and it performs well. The professional edition allows for linked virtual machines – linked machines can share common content to save on disk space. Machines can quickly require ~20GB if no content is shared.

Snow Leopard Server

Be aware that Mac OS X 10.6 Server is required for a virtual machine. The standard client edition is not permitted to run within a virtual environment.

OS X 10.7 and later can all be legally run within a virtual environment, so long as the underlying hardware is an Apple computer.

Maximise Resources

You are right to opt for as many resources as possible for your Mac. Running virtual machines can push your Mac. Try not to require needing multiple virtual machines running at once.

Graphical Limits

Graphical applications or those needing OpenGL support are not yet well supported by either VMWare or Parallels. OS X copes but falls back to software rendering; this may not best match your customers' environment.