As a software tester you probably already know how important it is to test software’s behavior under different circumstances. One of those circumstances may be watching your software perform while you manipulate with time.

You can time travel to future or past dates, different time zones, leap year, end of the year, month, billing cycle, test the daylight saving time, or just fast-forward to the time that your software requires to finish some action. If you don't want to do any changes to your code, change the system clock, or isolate the server then you should find yourself a tool that will help you.

Benefits:

1. Early bug discovery in software development - There are some test case examples where you would need to wait for some time to see the outcome of your test. For example, you want to get a notification in your software one day before the end of the month. Instead of waiting, just change the date.
2. Discovering possible future miscalculations in reports - You can speed up the time to see how will your software behave based upon the parameters that you have entered.
3. Financial validation - Validate your finances at any point in time in the future.
4. Workflows testing - See how the events in your workflow will look before you reach them in real-time.
5. Policy expiration testing - Check if your clients will be notified when the policy expiration date is near.
6. Data aging/archiving - Check if the data will be archived in the given time.

If you want to expand your testing possibilities, time manipulation software tools are definitely the way to go. Besides you can use them in your automated tests as well.

To start with, you can check some of these tools:

• TimeShiftX
• Time Machine
• Serial Port Tool

Feel free to share your experience with us if you have already tried using or even automating these kinds of tools.