How should I test a stand alone application on different OS

I have developed an application with c++ on Vist开发者_开发知识库a. It works OK. But Now I want to be sure that it works on XP, on Windows 7, and later may be on some types of linux. What good methods do developers use for this task?

There is no substitute for actually running it on the platform itself. If you cannot afford to have separate machines dedicated to each platform then you need to:

• Partition the disk(s) on a single machine and install each O/S in its own partition, and multi-boot between them.
• Use virtualization software like VMWare or VirtualBox (free!) to set-up each O/S under your host O/S

If your application make little or no use of graphics (or other) hardware then the latter option is a real possibility; if it does use this hardware extensively then you have little choice but to go for the former option.

I use vmware. You can also use VBox or something similar. If you use visual studio along with vmware workstation you can even remote debug your application running in the VMWare.

Obviously keeping to the standard in C++ helps for portability to linux.

go and get a virtual machine player and have functionnal virtual machines for each OS you will test.

Execute the same unitary test scenarii on all the virtual machines.

Don't hesitate to focuss on what may be implemented differently on each plateform:

1. Save/Load dialogs
2. Remote communication
3. Drag'n'Drop

that's what come to my mind, there maybe thousands of other issues.

Anything really really low level (with inline asm code for eample) may be impacted by OS change.