Reporting

No one likes to do paperwork, or provide reporting, as a matter of course. Yet, you, as a website developer, administrator, or an extension provider, will benefit from a host of standardized reports. These make excellent customer deliverables, and as a developer, would show a large amount of value to the client.

Keeping with our example of testing for an SQL injection, let's say that the site patch upgrade you are testing is vulnerable to that particular attack.

Using this tool to create a task is simple:

While creating a task we assign a Start Date and End Date, assign the Priority (in relation to the success of the project as whole), and then assign the resource to test it. In this demonstration, the engineer, John Smith will be testing the SQL injection fix.

As you can see, this would roll up to your dashboard and show you where the project is, keeping it on the track.

One major flaw with many software packages, GNU/GPL, and commercial products for Joomla! is the lack of good documentation. While it's difficult to write good documentation, it is not impossible. Having a process and a tool to assist you is one way to deliver on that need. Lighthouse gives you a central repository to create, track, and distribute documentation.

With this, you can track emails, project notes, conversations with the client and your team, memos, and so on. All this can be used to quickly create polished and professional documentation that will flow into your customer's hands, your disaster recovery handbook, and your user guides. This will provide an excellent historical resource to fall back on in times of trouble.

In the following figure, you can see that Lighthouse has covered all the bases when it comes to document and record collection.

My background is in the role of technical presales support, working for large, multinational computer system vendors. In that role, I author worked closely with all types of companies, from their CIO, down to their technicians. This unique employment gave the opportunity of seeing both good and bad practices. One of the very good practices in those companies is documenting up front the tests they wish to conduct on a given piece of hardware or software.

You have the same need and responsibility to your project, website, or client of establishing test parameters, test scripts, processes to conduct the test, and document the metrics.

Once again, Lighthouse has the perfect platform for this:

You create a test script and store it here. The testing engineer can log in, grab the script, run it, and record the results. This will allow you to define, test, and record the results of multiple test scenarios.

The Lighthouse tool, found at www.artifactsoftware.com, offers both a free hosted version with full capabilities, but limited to a single project, all the way to a full suite of tools for a very nominal fee.

Since you are serious about setting up a test and development environment, you should consider researching and using the Lighthouse tool. You will be glad you did.

Special thanks to Artifact Software, for their kind permission to use the screen shots in this chapter.