The Risk From Roaming User Profile. One Of Tester's Checklist For Software Testing.

From my software testing experience, I have got many issues related to the Roaming User Profile from customers. So, I think this issue is important enough to consider when we start doing the software testing.

Roaming User Profile

First of all, I would like to introduce the term of Roaming User Profile. Roaming User Profile is a system process that allows a user can access his documents and has a consistent desktop experience on any computer. To enable this feature these computers have to join the Active Directory. The key concept is that a group of files for a user will be transferred to the machine that user is logging in.

What is its risk?

As I have said, user profile's files will bind to user but not bind to machine. So, if developers store any software configuration in a machine, we should ensure that there is no any Configuration File which tries to refer any item in a machine cause the problem. From my software testing experience, the possible problem can be:

1. Configuration File in user profile refers to an installation path of software. It can cause the problem because the installation path in any machine can be customized by user - C:\Program Files in the first machine, D:\Program Files in the second machine, for example.

2. Configuration File in user profile refers to version of software. It can cause the problem because there is no guarantee that all of the machines will be upgraded to the same version at the same time.

From this example, I think testers should consider User Roaming Profile as one checklist when execute software testing. The suggested solution for this issue is to set up Roaming User Profile as one test environment when do any software testing.