Testing on restricted users

Question

I am using visual Studio 2013 test agents and controllers to do testing on the end environment. The end environment is composed of a single virtual machine running Windows 7 with a user that has very little privileges (most of them are blocked using group policy). Is there a way to run a test agent on that user in order to have the closest testing environment as possible?

Answer 1

I'd recommend having a local admin account that you can do your installations with. So long as the VM is up and running, if you install the Visual Studio Agents and register it with your controller, you should be fine. I have used a very similar setup for a couple of my performance tests where it made more sense to use peoples machines in the office rather than servers for a more realistic result or when I need additional load generators but don't have enough servers.

Edit 12/24/14: I've had to do this a couple of times lately. I've found the best way was to bind the credentials for the users that I wanted to test with to the test. This can be done by binding the credentials themselves, or, a less secure way, if you need more than 1 user per test, put credentials into an xml file or database, and bind that as the credentials.