How to automate installer testing

Question

I\'m wondering if anyone has any best practices for automating the testing of installers on various machines with potentially different hardware / software profiles and by s

Answer 1

If you have the installer runnable from the command line, it's easy to have a script to call it automatically.

Then you can use a web app testing tool to see it the install was successful, like this one http://seleniumhq.org/ For this you will need an unique way to test a new install - like a page with the current version.

Answer 2

We have created a set of VMs and find it is very easy to manage. We run the tests for 13 different Windows installers over night. The VMs we have created our very bare bones, so it is possible to run a number of tests in parallel.