At the Professional Developers’ Conference (PDC) in October last year, we disclosed information on a generalist testing tool (codenamed “Camano”) within Visual Studio® Team System 2010 that focuses entirely on test case management. Today we have formally named the tool:  Microsoft Test and Lab Manager!  Test and Lab Manager will be available with several of the Visual Studio Team System products including Visual Studio Team Test 2010.

We expect that there will be plenty of cases where generalist testers will want to manage and execute test cases without installing the entire Visual Studio system on each machine.  To help make that easier, we will also release a scaled down edition for generalist testers called Visual Studio Team Test 2010 Essentials.

This gives us a great line up of test related products:

Visual Studio® Team Test 2010 Support for the specialist tester including Web and load testing capabilities in addition to the ability to create automated test suites.  Executes in the Visual Studio environment for test professionals.  Comes with Microsoft Test and Lab Manager.
Visual Studio® Team Test 2010 Essentials Support for the generalist tester including the ability to manage test cases and manual/automated test execution.  Installs as a scaled down product for easy access on test machines.
Visual Studio® Lab Management 2010 Support for creating virtualized environments with snapshot capabilities.  You can now execute your tests using the lab capabilities and save the state later for both development and test usage.

The new products are a great addition to the Visual Studio Team System product family and are a key part of our goal to help cut down on the number of “no-repro” scenarios that are experienced today between developers and testers.

We are finalizing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 as we speak.  I hope you will install the builds and send us your feedback!