Musings of a tester testing test tools! : Dogfood

Our first raving fan for Team Test in VSTS 2010!

anutthara — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:09:00 GMT

Yay - I finally got to see our Dev10 Team Test bits being used in production! E&D team in in MSIT, India is going live on VSTS 2010 for their test case management. These guys are pretty avid dogfooders and have taken to the product pretty fast - creating their test cases, plans, suites...on the server and using Test and Lab Manager in their daily lives. We have a whole slew of early adopters using VSTS 2010 for production and MSIT, our internal IT division is an important dogfooder for us.

As Amit tells us all the time, one of our goals for VSTT 2010 is to create “raving fans” of our product - and it's great to see our first local raving fan for Team Test! :-)

Latest trends in software testing

anutthara — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 11:20:00 GMT

Check out this article in ITMagz.com that covers the latest trends in software testing. This is written by our very own industry expert, Tanuj Vohra that runs the Program Management team for VSTT.

Virtualization testing is something that has taken off pretty well lately - and we have been using it a fair bit internally at the empire too. With the Lab Management SKU being the latest addition to the VSTS family, we have been attempting to dogfood it in our test lab. Before the dogfood though, we have an internal team that's built a tool called Virtual Lab which can create disposable virtual machines super-fast based on similar technology. This tool has clearly upped the productivity of the team - no more fighting for repro machines, elaborate installs etc. Everyone has a host machine that can put up upto 4 VMs.

Tell me if your team uses virtualization to speed up your testing!

But will the dog eat the dog food?

anutthara — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:40:59 GMT

Since I am a tester on the Test edition of VSTS - I get this q a lot of times: "Do you use VSTST for testing VSTST?" And the answer is "You bet, I do!" :)

As you might know already, this is called "Dogfooding". Many Microsoft products are dogfooded extensively before release - Vista, MSN Search, Visual Studio, Team System...

Our devs use unit test types to write their developer regression tests. Our QA team uses unit tests to write our functional tests. Yes, I know this is not a perfect fit for UI heavy testing, but it does suffice for the time being. We use generic tests to wrap our legacy tests that may be scripts or batch files. Load tests are added to the test bed to do stress testing on the app. All of this goes into the TFS server that we have deployed for the entire Developer Division and testing performed out of it.

Like any other user, I have my own set of pet features and pet peeves in TST. I absolutely love the code coverage coloring, the "Run test" from the editor (Orcas feature), the ease with which load tests can be configured and the controller-agent functionality. It makes my life so much easier as a tester. Not to mention that it's incredibly easy to point out to devs where the problems are and associate results with bugs since we use TFS for work item tracking. Now for the bad parts - I think the test list feature is absolutely useless for large test projects. The UI confuses me - more than once, I have selected a test in the window, right clicked and said "Run checked tests", but some other tests start running!! That's because selecting a run is not the same as checking it. :( I have a wishlist as well - stuff like test case management being easier to handle, the test run results being easier to analyze etc.

The best part of dogfooding is that this is a good chance to know which features are likely to be real relief and which ones are mostly going to tick the users off. Testers being the first customers of the tool is literally true in this case. Plus the QA team gets additional testing in the process so that bugs/suggestions are filed before outside users get a chance to go at it.

So, do you eat your own dogfood? ;-)