I have started to write about the “Microsoft Test And Lab Management” in the Introduction post where I presented three sections in the tool: Testing Center, Lab Center and Organize.

You can read the post here.

This is the first part out of four for the Organize section, later I will post about the Testing Center section but I still don’t know how many parts I will posts for that section.

I intend to create a quick guide for the “Microsoft Test And Lab Management” out of these posts that will be published in the “Team System Guides” that can be found here.

When working with the “Microsoft Test And Lab Management” for the first time you will need to start with the Organize section where you do 4 things:

1. Create Shared Steps for Test Cases
2. Create Test Cases
3. Create Configurations
4. Create Test Plans

You can start by doing each of the tasks, the order here is the order I will use for my example.

In this post I will show the Shared Steps and on the following three posts I will show the Test Cases, Configurations and the Test Plans.

Step 1: In order to open the “Organize” launch the tool and select the Organize option.

The “Organize” toolbar will be shown.

Step 2: Click on the “Shared Steps” option to get to the Shared Steps management.

Step 3: Clicking the “New” button will open a new Shared Step form.

The first part of the form is for managing the item.

Second part of the form is the Steps, Summary, History, Links and File Attachments.

I like to focus on the Steps section, all the other parts are similar to regular work items.

In the Steps tab you can see two parts:

1. Steps, Expected Results and the step attachment.
2. Parameters

In the steps I will use the @ to refer to a parameter, the parameter is changing from one test to another and I will show it when we get to create the Test Case.

After filling all the fields all you left to do is click on the “Save and Close” button or the “Save” button and you will have a shared test steps ready to be used in Test Cases.

There are two more functions I haven’t talked about in the “Shared Steps Manager”:

1. Create Copy Button – Highlighting a shared steps line and click the button will create a new shared steps item with the steps already written, saves time when there are similar scenarios with small changes.
2. Create action recording button – Highlighting a Shared Steps line and clicking on this button will launch the Test Runner allows you to create a recording for the steps. This is a very powerful function and I will talk about it in future posts.

You can always modify the Shared Test Steps, just open the item, make all the required changes and save it again. All the Test Cases will be automatically updated with the change.

Have Fun!!!