How to test a program against a particular device without having the device?

Question

I was wondering if there is any solution to test a hardware-dependent software against a particular device.

For example consider a program which depends on Bluetooth or printer, using it through the OS APIs. How does developers deal with a situation when a users report that it does not work properly on a particular laptop model, if there is not enough debugging information available.

As another example, how can we know what paper sizes a specific printer supports without buying one and running a program on it to enumerate supported sizes.

Is there any way to simulate that device/driver or any service that provide the ability to test against that device?

Answer 1

Some things can be "emulated" others will force you to have at least the basic hardware so that later you could run a set of tests besides trying to code following standards, RFC's, etc. For example in the case of printers: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7472 and cups-pdf, could help, but that will cover just the basics.

In some cases, the hardware is bought and co-located within a rack in a datacenter where later the developers access to it remotely by using a KVM over IP also known as ("spider").

If a specific feature/bug needs to be tested in a specific system, there are companies that could lease the hardware (Mac/PC/phones/tablets/etc) saving cost with this.

Besides shipping a "debug/report" tool could help in many cases to better diagnose the running system or catch/report issues if any.

For testing mobile devices you could use for example AWS Device Farm