Microsoft team system 2010 test essentia the good, the bad and the uglyls

Microsoft team system 2010 test essentials – "the good, the bad and the ugly"

Obviously Microsoft announcement on the 20'Th of October for the new testing tools and capabilities of team system 2010 was a big wow…something that we have waited for a very long time.

I really liked the tester profile that Microsoft was aiming at:"the generalist tester" (what we all call "manual tester"). Accordingly Microsoft build a testing suite that should answer most of the desires that the generalist tester has (more than 70% of testing are done manually). They didn't forget off course the other 30% and build some capabilities for these testers as well….

On this post I will elaborate on the 5 "good" elements that Microsoft included in this suite (in the next one I will speak of the "bad" and "ugly" ones)

 The good: there are few initiatives that should make the difference:

1.      Lab Management - the most important step toward "no more no reproduce".  This idea is based on system center virtual machine manager that enable the tester to attach a snap shot of the defect environment to the bug report. This enable the developer to run the test on the same environment as the tester did.

2.      Rich bug - when finding a bug the tester will only have to "open" a new bug report and add a "name" to that report. All the rest will be added automatically including:

                         i.     Video recording of the run

                        ii.     Enable action recording

                      iii.     Capture machine information

                    iv.     Screen capture

3.               Coded UI – just like other record and playback tools (QTP) this feature can be used for functional testing. It is not too hard to deal with but still coding capabilities are a must.

4.               Manual test runner – a very handy feature that will record all the manual testing and will enable the tester to run the same tests automatically on future runs.

5.               Impact analysis – every code or requirement changes can show immediately the impact on other elements in the software and which tests must be run accordingly.

Ram

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