Sigist 2009 – The Rise Of QA (Microsoft Test & Lab Manager)
Today I had the honor to present Microsoft Keynote in Sigist 2009 conference, the new and powerful tester tool in Visual Studio Team System 2010 "Microsoft Test & Lab Manager"
SIGiST Israel was founded in June 2000, by Mr. Alon Linetzki, and was self sponsored, for the first few meetings. Today, after many meetings, out of which several were sponsored by RadView, Rational (IBM) and Mercury (HP-Software), SIGiST Israel is the most reorganized testing community in the Israeli market. The SIGiST board today includes also Mr. Yan Baron, Automation Manager, Comverse, and Mrs. Debi Zylbermann, senior consultant in software quality assurance and website promotion.
I talked about the new improvements in "Microsoft Test & Lab Manager" – Manual Testing & Automated Testing, Shay Mandel the PM of Lab manager from India gave a wonderful lecture about Lab Manager Virtualization Solution.
After the lecture so many people came to ask questions about the tool, express their enthusiasm of the new features and abilities and everyone toke DVDs with Visual Studio Team System 2010 & Team Foundation Server 2010 – There is no doubt the QA group loves this tool.
I have no doubt that "Microsoft Test & Lab Manager" is the - Rise Of QA!!!
For more information about the "Microsoft Test & Lab Manager" you can enter the links below or contact me for any additional questions.
Manual Testing
Bye “Camano” And Welcome To “Microsoft Test and Lab Manager”
Microsoft Test & Lab Manager - Interface
Microsoft Test & Lab Manager – Test Plan
Visual Studio 2010 – Historical Debugging
Automated Testing
VS2010 – New Web\Load Test Feature – Request Details
VS2010 – Validation\Extraction Rules Extensions
VS2010 – Coded UI Test
VS2010 – Load Test Network Emulation Profile
How To : Create Visual Studio Add-ins
There are two different Add-in project types: Visual Studio and Shared
Visual Studio Add-ins vs. Shared Add-ins
A Visual Studio add-in can be loaded into both Visual Studio and the Visual Studio Macros IDE. Conversely, a Shared add-in can be loaded only into Microsoft Office applications such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Visio, and Microsoft Excel.
Also, each type offers a different set of options. For example, the Visual Studio Add-in Wizard allows you to:
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Create a command bar user interface (UI) for your add-in,
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Define when the add-in loads, and
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Insert information into the Visual Studio Help About box.
The Shared Add-in Wizard only allows you to:
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Specify whether the add-in loads when the host application (that is, the Office application) loads, and
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Specify whether the add-in is available to all users of the computer or only the person who installed it.
In short, create Shared add-ins for use in Office applications, and create Visual Studio add-ins for use in Visual Studio.
How To : Create Visual Studio Add-ins
First let’s create new visual studio addin project.
Add Name and Description to your Addin
When you successfully create you new project build the solution
Close Visual Studio and Reopen.
You will notice that MyVisualStudioAddin is placed in the “Tools” menu.
(The Smiley is a default icon by Visual Studio)
Microsoft Test & Lab Manager – Test Plan
In my last post I talked about Microsoft Test & Lab Manager - Interface, in this post I’ll talk about creating new test plan.
But before we can create Test Plan we must connect to a Context to work on.
The first thing you will see is “Set Plan Context”, as I said in the last post – you can’t start working without a Plan!
If you already define plan for your testing team you can select those and if not create new Test Plan.
“New Test Plan” – Is very simple screen that allows you to define your testing plan for specific dates.
In the right side you will see that each Test Plan is assigned to specific Tester\Manager under the Owner Field.
Test Plan are usually written before the actual product releases, and for this reason you can define that State to Inactive.
Start date = when we are planning to start working on this plan and the end time when we have to finish this plan.
Under each Test Plan you can define Test Settings for two types of test – 1. Manual Test , 2. Automatic Test
Test Settings are not Test Configuration(Browser type or OS etc…), Using Test Settings you can define what kind of information you want to collect when running the test and where you want to run it.
You can create new Test Settings or edit existing Settings by select and click Open.
How do you want to run test?
- Manually on my local machine
- Manually and collect information from remote computer.
- Automatic Test on remote server.
Data and Diagnostics
This is one of many great improvements: What and How much of data you want Microsoft Test & Lab Manager will collect while you running the tests…
Action Recording and Action Log – You can record your UI actions to create an action recording that can be played back later.You can also record the UI actions as text in a log file to review what actions you perform when running a test. those can also be added as extra information to a bug.
ASP.NET Profiler – Activate ASP.NET profiler and also profile database interactions.
Code Coverage – By adding program assembly you can get the Code Coverage % for each test.
Diagnostic Trace Collector – Events only, Records significant diagnostic event only which has minimal impact on performance.
Events, Methods and Parameters, Record method-level tracing which has potential impact on performance.
Event Log - Event logs to collect from the machine where the data collector is run.
Network Emulation – Select which network profile you want to use.
System Information – Collect System Information to be added as extra information to a bug.
Test Impact Collector - By using test impact analysis, you can identify the tests that you should run, based on coding changes that were made to the application that you are testing between builds
*** If you enable collecting test impact data, collecting code coverage data will not work.
Video Recorder – Record the Screen or specific application during the test,after test complete each step will be linked to his time line inside the video.
Last thing is “Test Configuration” – you can define what types of configuration needed to be tested during this test plan.
You can add your own configuration, test configuration will help you create better test matrix.
The Test Plan is complete and ready, set the test plan as your current Context and start working.
Microsoft Test & Lab Manager – Interface
You have properly heard about Microsoft Test & Lab Manager, the new Testing tool coming with Visual Studio 2010.
The new interface for the tester is great, gives you to control your work more easily.
The Context(1) shows on which team project are you working, each context provides the list of plans on which you work.
Microsoft Test & Lab Manager is more than just running tests and for this you can switch views by selecting center group(2), each view has different categories(3) to work with and here is the list of options available under each category.
Testing Center
- Plan – Define the testing plan and set working plan.
- Test – Running Test
- Track – Track you bug and tasks.
Lab Center
- Environments – Manage virtual environments
- Test Settings – define test settings for manual and automatic tests.
- Library – Collection for environments templates.
- Controllers – Manage Test controllers.
Organize
- Test Plans - Define the testing plan
- Configuration – Define configurations on which you want to run tests.
- Test Cases – All Test Cases in the system.
- Shared Steps – Shared step.
By this approach, before start testing you must select the Context(test plan) you are working on, there is not reason to run testing not inside a test plan.
Over the next post I’ll write a lot more about Microsoft Test & Lab Manager.