Use Your Mainframe to Test

As testers we typically receive software from a development group at the end of the build cycle and then install this software into a given test system. We then run a set of pre-written test cases that exercise the software in a way that tests the software in a simulated environment. These tests generally take one of 3 forms. 1) We examine manually or programmatically the UI screens that the software produces. 2) We test the objects and methods of those objects in the program by exercising test code that interacts with the product code. 3) We do a "System Test" or black box test that places the product in a simulated user environment and then we do the operations that an end user would and verify the results.