Here is what I hope might be a constructive response to Brian Marick's thoughts in his post on Exploration Through Example about fine-grained guidance in exploratory testing. One heuristic that I've had some success with is a bit more on the lines...

This is information for Beta 2 - if you stumble across this in the future and have a ship version of VSTS please consider it expired and rotting so that it does not cause you more harm than good. That said, and with the disclaimer that applies to all...

If you are upgrading/migrating a VSS 6.0 source control database to the Visual Studio Team System Version Control System (which is different than VSS 8.0 AKA VSS 2005) you will likely need the VSSConverter tool. The VSSConverter tool will likely complain...

Just came across this Channel 9 video of Rico Mariani (performance architect) teaching people how to fish for performance issues -- http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=54964

MSPress offered me a free copy of their book Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services a few months ago if I would review it on my blog. I figured I could use the book, and were no rules, deadlines, etc. I don't really consider myself a sell-out since Microsoft...

If you're having trouble setting up Team Project user permissions through the Beta 2 UI, try dropping to the command line and using gssutil.exe, it has a bunch of command line help that should get you mostly on your way, the /g+ option will let you add...

Here's a link to a link on Rob Caron's blog that has a link to an installation guide for VSTS Beta 2: http://blogs.msdn.com/robcaron/archive/2005/04/28/413289.aspx I know it's a roundabout path, but the joy is in the journey -- especially if you...

If you are getting error messages with ASP.NET and you installed IIS after installing VS (instead of the other way around) you need to register ASP.NET manually. Here's the easiest way I know how to do this if you install VS and IIS in that order:...

TFS was giving me the "Working..." message but nothing was working. I was trying to check in to source control, and the progress bar never completed. Turns out it was a plumbing problem, the intranet proxy server was timing out in its attempt to proxy...

Lots of good information at this site on what pairwise testing is - http://www.pairwise.org/

This really belongs in the comments field of my last blog post, but it turned out I had more thoughts to vent and this would make a monster of a comment, so here goes: What more could there be to dynamic analysis than code coverage and profiling? Probably...

Q: What's the difference between code profiling and dynamic code analysis? A: Dynamic Code Analysis is a category of analysis features, code profiling is a specific feature in that category. Code coverage (which uses the same engine as the profiler...

It looks like AutomatedQA is doing some great integration work with Team System, adding to what ships in the box: http://www.automatedqa.com/products/team_system_support.asp "AutomatedQA is commited to offer tight integration with the Microsoft...

Not breaking news or anything, this document is prominently dated "April 1, 2005" on the front page so it's been out for a while, but for anyone else interested in security and the software development lifecycle, this could make for some interesting reading...

On a test app that I was load testing, I wasn't seeing any SQL trace information even though I was quite sure the web application was getting its content via a backend SQL database on the same machine. As it turns out, the default is that the SQL trace...

I wanted to see if there was a way to publish the progress of ongoing manual test results, unfortunately, this is not supported in V1 however some advice from the dev team on what is possible: "The closest approximation for this version is as follows...

Q: When I try to open a load test result (attached to a bug) I get the following. "Load test results could not be restored because a results repository was not used when the load test was run." A: You have to configure your machine to store load test...

Just had a chance to see an internal demo on the TFS reporting and data mining type features. The walkthrough included using Excel pivot tables and integration into OLAP cubes. It was all hooked into our dogfood TFS system so the data being reported was...

This was released about a year ago, but still some valuable information on ASP.NET perf tuning: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpag/html/scalenetchapt17.asp "This chapter provides an iterative process to systematically...

"The Most Critical New Vulnerabilities Discovered or Patched During the First Quarter of 2005" http://www.sans.org/top20/Q1-2005update/