Some features are not sexy, nor cool.
But we need them. Many of the features we’re adding to Isolator come from the needs of our development team. It is usually the case that if our team needs a solution, others do as well. And this one plagued us and our customers from the beginning.
There can’t be only one
The way Isolator was built, it was not possible to have only one version installed on the machine. That required project upgrades with each version. But that became a problem overtime, usually in CI server environments. As long as you have only one team, and they all use the same version. Upgrades is something everybody does together.
This becomes quite an organizational headache in large teams. And then you have projects that have require different versions on the same build machine. We’ve added the auto-deploy feature for the server, but that wasn’t enough. It required too much maintenance.
And like I said, this wasn’t a problem just for customers. It was an internal issue as well. A developer needs to develop a new feature on V next, while checking support issues on different versions, because that’s how we roll.
We decided to solve the problem in Isolator V7: We wanted to run projects with older (or newer) versions, with minimal intervention. The big challenge was older versions: How do we make old versions run, if we can’t change them? Our time machine has been broken for a while…
But we did it.
From V7 on, you’ll be able to run projects that reference old version of Isolator as old as version 5.2.3 (there was a bug in prervious versions we couldn’t overcome), on the same machine that have tests compiled with the new versions.
That means that once you install V7 on a client or a server machine, and you have test projects with any other versions, all you need are the reference dlls for that version locally. Everything else will take care of itself. Every server operation you already have (command lines, tasks, auto-deployment) will work as before – No need to change anything you’re doing.
Some features are not sexy, nor cool.
They just make life easier.
Want to know more about V7? Join me in the webinar to see what’s coming.
