Our goal is:

1. Quickly create a release of our WPF application
2. Share it via upload (to a shared server or to some remote service like Github)
3. Have one of our testers, many of whom do not work in software, have access to this release
4. Have them be able to run the full application with minimal troubleshooting

Considerations:

• Time taken from code change to newly available version provided to testers
• Minimal set-up / technical proficiency required by testers to access new versions of the program
• General costs meaning both monetarily and memory wise

Possibilities:

• Building a full installer for each test version, uploading to shared server and having the tester download it (takes lots of time and memory)
• Create VMs with full configuration of application and have developers re-deploy newest builds onto this image which is shared in some cloud hosting service (would rely on a third party service and is really overkill for what we need, we just need be able to open the application itself and don’t really need the virtual OS)
• Some equivalent to Docker (or similar) that would create a Windows Container that could either run, or simply deploy the WPF application on a testers computer while maintaining a small file size that is easier to share.

Is there a standard process for this? What are the best practices here?