Visual Studio 2010 makes Testing/QA professionals officially happy (it’s true!) - Test Professional and Test Case WorkItem Type

dotnetcurry - 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 non-availability 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.

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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 divided in two distinct parts. …

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(via DotNetKicks - Introduction to Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 (www.dotnetcurry.com))

dotnetcurry - Visual Studio Test Professional 2010: Test Case WorkItem Type

“Microsoft has given a lot of importance and thought on testing in Visual Studio 2010. One of the popular demands that have been attended to in Visual Studio 2010 is to create Test Case as a workitem type. Creating such a workitem type makes it easy for test and project managers to track the testing efforts in context with various requirements, features and other logical conditions. In this article we will take a close look at this workitem type.

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Conclusion: In this article we have studied the test case workitem type in details. In the next article we will study other artifacts of the test plan in Visual Studio Test Professional 2010.

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I don’t know how many spreadsheets, doc’s, etc of “test cases” I’ve seen and written over the years, but it’s too many. It’s not the writing of them that I hate so much, it’s their static, disconnected nature. The fact that you KNOW that the minute you save it, it’s out of date. That you KNOW in the next version it’s going to be “wrong” and need to be updated. That you KNOW you’re just building a pile of legacy work that you may never refer to again (or even find for that matter).

Now I’ve been around long enough to know that TFS2010 will not be the silver bullet to slay the Test Case Beast. But it looks like a solid step forward in the right direction at least (so maybe it’s like a silver coated bullet? ;)

We’ll see once it ships and we start using it in the real world…