Go Test It is a hosted service: we provide all the test machines and web browsers through our test infrastructure. That’s incredibly convenient because you don’t need to waste precious hours of your life debugging test machine issues and installing system updates – we do that for you.
However, you still have to host the application you want to test yourself. If you’re testing a public-facing production website, that’s no problem – our test servers can access the site like any regular user. But chances are that you want to test development, staging and pre-production versions of your application, and you’ll typically be running them on a server inside your organisation’s network.
The good news is that this is normally not a problem. With the following 3 steps you can give us access to a specific testing server:
Identify the name of the test server on your internal network, and the port number on which the test version of your application is running. Then ask your IT department to forward a port on your organisation’s public IP address to this internal server and port. This is a standard feature supported by most routers, and should take your IT guys only a couple of seconds to set up. Note the public IP address and external port number which are set up.
Make it secure by locking down the source IP addresses which may access this service. That way only our test servers can see the test version of your site, but nobody else on the internet can. Ask your IT department to only allow access from the following IP addresses:
93.93.131.122
79.125.54.3(More addresses may be added in future as we grow our infrastructure.) Restricting access by IP address is a standard feature of firewalls and should also take no more than a few seconds to set up.
In your Go Test It account, click “run test now” and choose the scripts and the browsers you want to use. At the bottom of the page, there is a box where you can enter your target server. For example, if your organisation’s public IP address is 12.34.56.78 and the external port set up by your IT department is 9999, you would enter http://12.34.56.78:9999 in this box.
You only need to enter these numbers once – the next time you want to run a test, you’ll see your internal test server as one of the choices.
And that’s it! From now on you can take advantage of the Go Test It infrastructure, even if your server is behind your corporate firewall.