Introduction to Visual Studio Test Professional 2010

Microsoft offered the testing tools built in Visual Studio Team System since 2005. Although these tools were probably not as rich and mature as some of the competitors in the field, they provided quite high ROI wherever they could be used. There were some gaps like nonavailability of comprehensive test management tools, test case not being recognized as workitem etc. Microsoft has done lot of homework before making a new offering with Visual Studio 2010. Name of the new product offered is Visual Studio Test Professional 2010. It is designed keeping in mind the needs of the organizations as well as the individual testers. Goal of the organization that is doing software development is to achieve the optimum quality of the product as desired by the customer and at the same time maintain high productivity in testing. Testers and other testing professional in the team are integral part of the team that is developing software. Activities that the testing professionals perform are invaluable for the team to maintain high quality of the product. It is necessary for these professionals to do the testing most efficiently and thoroughly. It is also necessary for them to provide necessary and sufficient data with the bugs that they file so that the bug fixing can also be done with minimum efforts. For these goals to be met, the organizational and testers needs have to be successfully satisfied by the environment which facilitates testing. Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 creates an environment for various roles within the scope of testing and bug fixing. 1. For test manager or test leads it provides the tools to define the scope and direction of the testing. They can define the test cases to be executed, configuration of the supporting environment and the settings of the testing tools. All of these are to simulate the testing environment as close to the reality as possible. 2. Test planners can do planning of the tests depending upon the needs of requirements, features and their prioritization. They can create groups of the tests and assign owners to them. They can also assign the resources to execute (run) the tests. 3. Testers are facilitated by a dedicated environment to run the tests that are assigned to them by test planners and if necessary file a bug that is rich in information easily. Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is a new set of tools and user interface that is a separate application. It is called Microsoft Test Manager - MTM. It is a WPF based application for all testing professionals. It is a an observation that Testing professionals get overwhelmed and intimidated due to abundance of menu items that have no relevance to them. MTM provides a user friendly interface for testing professionals.

Microsoft Test Manager 2010 (MTM) has to work in tandem with Team Foundation Server. It works closely with the artifacts like test cases, test plan and environments that are stored on TFS. MTM opens by asking us to connect to a test plan which is a part of the team project in which we are working. Once connected, MTM is divided in two sections.

The first section is 'Testing Center' that is meant for all testing professionals to execute their tasks and activities. Testing manager of the project can do test management and testers can execute the tests. Management of the testing efforts is to Plan the test strategy which in turn means to create various Test Cases and other artifacts which will be the building blocks for test plan Create Test Plan for the project which will include various combination of test cases based upon different logic Set the various settings of the testing. Track the test runs

The second section is 'Lab Center'. Lab center facilitates the management of virtual environments. These virtual environments are created and used by the team members for collaborative efforts. Environments are built using virtual machines which in simulate the scenarios which are very near to reality and allow the tests to be executed, recorded and later on re-simulated for the benefit of the developers in case of any bug.

Testing Center is made up of four sections based upon the group of functionality. These sections are: 1. Organize: Tools and utilities in this section allow us to create various artifacts related to testing. These artifacts are test plan, test cases, shared steps and test configuration. Once these artifacts are created, we can use them to plan the testing efforts.

2. Plan: This is the section where we create the plan for testing. The test plan consists of a. Properties like state, owner of the test plan, schedule of activation, classification (iteration and area to which it belongs) and the test settings that are to be applied.

b. Contents, which are comprised of groups of test cases that are called as Test Suites. Grouping in the test suite is done with certain logic. For example, all the test cases those are children of a requirement or which are in a particular Area Path etc.

3. Test: This section provides the list of test cases in various test suites and then opens another rich interface for execution of tests. After the test is executed it also provides the results of the various test runs. A subsection of it provides a way to verify that the related bug is fixed. When you select to verify then it runs the test again.

4. Track: Is a section to execute various queries to know the status of the testing efforts. It also is used to view the recommended tests after a build containing bug fix is executed successfully. After the build is executed the Assign Build activity can be used to change the build assignment to the test plan.