Recently, I have been spending time reviewing papers submitted to two of the biggest software testing conferences in India – QAI’s Software Testing Conference and the Step In Summit 2012 . It is very refreshing to talk to young talent across...

Continuing from the previous post , here is our last myth: Myth 3: Bugs found through exploratory testing are hard to reproduce Testers have to remember exactly what steps they did and note it down in detail when they find a defect. The stated problem...

Let's pick up mythbusting from where we left off Myth 2: There is no way to measure exploratory testing I have heard this often from test managers – “how do we measure testers’ productivity in exploratory testing?” Scripted...

Over the past few weeks, we have heard a spate of complaints about TFS database being bloated with test data and growing in size rapidly with time. Running tests regularly generates different kinds of data in your TFS database, primary categories being...

In the last part , I introduced exploratory testing and looked at some advantages of employing exploratory testing. In this part, let’s look at a few myths surrounding exploratory testing and try to debunk some of these. Myth 1: “Exploratory...

I have been meaning to put together a series of blog posts on exploratory testing - how exploratory testing can help make your testing more lightweight, illustrate some of our own experiments with doing exploratory testing on my team and of course, write...

There have been some pretty good books released recently that discuss software testing with Visual Studio ALM 2010 in detail. I thought I would point out 3 noteworthy books in my post today. Software Testing with Visual Studio 2010 (Microsoft .NET Development...

Cliched, but true : the thing I love the most about Microsoft is the chance to work with some of the smartest people around! One such guy is J.D. Meier , GPM at P&P in Microsoft by day, and amazing life-coach by night (well, in non-working-hours J...

Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 is now available to MSDN subscribers. The feature pack contains some much awaited bits with which you can: Use Microsoft Test Manager to capture and playback action recordings for Silverlight 4 applications. Create coded...

We recently released a rollup QFE for Microsoft Test Manager that contains fixes for some crashes, memory leaks and other issues reported. This patch is available for public download on Connect   Some of the more common issues that we have heard...

Customers trying to start up with MTM newly, often ask for general guidance around how to start from scratch on a new project. Here is some guidance that we recently published in MSDN that should help answer exactly this question: When you use Microsoft...

[Update on 11/14/2010] The Silverlight UI automation features are now released and available for public download here [Update on 11/7/2010] Last week at Dev Connections, we announced that the Silverlight UI automation tools will be available as part...

Cross browser testing on IE and FireFox is now supported in Visual Studio Test Tools with the release of the UI automation plugin for Mozilla Firefox . The primary scenario we want to target with the plugin is that you record a test in IE, and play...

Whenever we talk about platform coverage for UI automation one of the frequent requests is support for Silverlight app testing. We have been hard at work trying to cater to this need and here is an update on where we are with this roadmap. We are working...

Exploratory testing(ET) as defined by Bach is simultaneous learning, test design and execution. It is a scientific style of testing that is very effective at finding defects early and fast. Yet, we don’t have specific test tools that support testers doing...

When I talk to customers about using test tools, often enough, there are widely varying expectations on what the tool needs to do. Predictably, the generalist testers want a simple, easy to use tool that lets them write and run test cases manually, the...

This post will continue the previous post of Scaling up your CUIT UI automation for real world projects and walkthrough a sample test project using multiple UI maps. For this walkthrough, I illustrate writing tests for an e-business website called TailSpin...

Our team has been busy putting together content for the Test Tools in Visual Studio 2010, and here is a compilation of those resources including videos, walkthroughs, whitepapers and posts. Also listed are relevant blogs and twitter ids. Content index...

One of the complaints that we heard often from Coded UI test users in Beta2 was that the coded UI tests could not scale up to large projects. The single UI map that contained all the UI elements and recorded methods would quickly become unwieldy and confusing...

The pricing for the VS2010 SKUs are finally available. Check out the table below for retail prices Suggested Retail Pricing (USD) for Visual Studio 2010 With 1-Year MSDN Subscription* Product Buy Upgrade...

VS2010 Beta2 comes with a default license of only 250 virtual users per client. So, if you want to run a load test that needs to simulate more than 250 virtual users, you need to install an additional VU pack. As written in Ed’s blog , the easiest way...

Here is a snapshot of the platform support provided by Coded UI (and also ability to Fast Forward in Manual Test Runner) This will evolve over time based on the support that we, the product team or the community, our partners will add to CUIT. The...

The VSTS Rangers have come up with this great set of content on VS2010 ALM that is basically intended to answer the q “Tell me about VS2010 ALM in 5 mins”. The Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance consists of compact cheat sheets for Team Foundation...

Our PM team has put together a great series of demo videos to illustrate the new set of features available for testers as part of VS2010. We will eventually post these on C9 and team sites, but I wanted to publish this now to let you guys get a quick...

Yes, you CAN run your unit tests or any other VS test type on a machine without having Visual Studio IDE installed on that machine. You need the Visual Studio Team Agent to be installed on your test machine to run your tests. This is a 15 min lightweight...