Testing on different operating systems

I would recommend testing all of your target operating systems within VMware, both Windows 8 and Windows 7, using a VM for Win7 instead of your development environment.

Your development environment likely has a great deal of differences between a typical deployment machine, that can easily mask many kinds of bugs and configuration issues.

Testing on 'fresh' virtual machines, you can test and verify that you aren't forgetting any dependencies, configurations, etc that you need to run your software.

Use whatever working environment you feel is most productive for you and test in VM on all target platforms including the operating system you're using.

This approach gives you:-

• a consistent starting point
• a reproducible system (where others can repeat your tests given your VM)
• freedom from dependencies
• separation of dev / test environments

As for if you should use windows 8 or not, that's up to you... My experience has been that after installation you struggle with the new UI for a few days and then wonder what everyone made all the fuss was about (it's basically just that people fear change when you get to the bottom of it.) Your mileage may vary.

Use VMs. Snapshotting is extremely useful for testing. Snapshot it, do your test, and blow it away again, always mean you have a clean test environment. Also, you can clone a template, install version A in one, version B in another, and perform your tests against each. Very good to identify/spot regressions. Also, it is easier to adjust the system specification, you can ramp down the memory allocation to simulate a resource constrained environment, for example.