Today, I will finally end this series of blog posts where I’ve been talking about the main differences that you will find in Planning and Testing views (although they appear to be very similar at a first glance). You can find the previous posts here:...

In previous posts, I’ve been discussing why Planning and Testing views look similar but behave differently. You can refer to them by clicking on Part 1 , Part 2 , or Part 3 . Sometimes, depending on the organization, planning is done by some people, and...

Mouse Hover is an important part of a Application WorkFlow. Hovering on a control brings about changes in the application which leads to Controls appearing/disappearing , Properties of the controls being changed ,new windows coming up etc. Needless to...

Sometimes, you want to run your tests in a specific order. For example, you are testing an online shopping site. You want to test the work flow of Login, Browse items, Search items, Add items to cart and Check out. You have the test cases for each step...

In part 1 and part 2 of the series, I have mentioned reasons why we use similar views for planning and executing test cases (and I have discussed what makes these views different). Today, I will focus on yet another specific reason: Configurations. We...

You might have noticed above many grids there are two distinct toolbars. The primary one has options for interacting with items in the list. The other one that is right-aligned is for managing the view. Here are some examples: 1. Verify Bugs – change...

Our doc team (we call them the User Education or the UE team) has been hard at work supplementing the product with great deal lot of additional documentation to help you understand the various features in the product and to best leverage them. The table...

One thing you may not notice, but would if it didn’t work correctly, is what happens when there are two representations of the same item in different places and when one of the two instances changes. One example is opening a manager activity which lists...

Terry Clancy, a Business Development Manager with Microsoft, has posted about opportunities for partners. It is also a good overview of the features across Team Test and Team Lab, how things fit together, and includes plenty of screenshot eye candy. http...

I talked about customizing work items and how this can be used with categories to get the best out of MTM before , now I will expand on that topic and show you how to compose queries to include this extra level of information. If you go to the Queries...

In a previous blog post , I mentioned some of the reasons why the Planning and Testing views in MTM look very similar but behave differently. Today, in this post, I will continue talking about this. As you can see when playing around with the product...

I’ve posted an article on my MSDN blog about strategies and considerations when composing your test cases.  If you’re familiar with Test Case Authoring in MTLM ( Ryan Vogrinec and David R. Williamson both have helpful posts on the subject), you can...

Test steps are very important in manual testing because they provide the detailed semantics on how each test case is to be validated and ultimately completed.  That said, if you consider most manual test cases will have several steps each and most...

We love to hear your feedback and given that our final beta for Visual Studio 2010 is now available this is your best opportunity to influence the product. In Microsoft Test and Lab Manager(MTLM) we are using the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement...

In manual or automated testing, you will probably want to specify your own test settings when running tests. The test settings associated with the test plan will be used by default when you click Run button in Run Tests. There are two ways to create or...

With MTM, we store our settings in your user profile. Specifically the ‘ Local App Data ’ section of your user profile. These are simple XML files that have your settings from MTM – window size/location, whether the Test Runner is docked or floating,...

In a previous post , I briefly mentioned the back and forward buttons. Today I want to talk a bit more in depth about the issues we had in adding this common and seemingly simple concept to Microsoft Test and Lab Manager. Although the general behavior...

As this previous post explains, before Microsoft Test Manager, there was no real need to know which work items represent bugs or test cases. With VS2010, we introduced the concept of work item categories, which allows us to give a meaning to some of the...

During the course of a manual test run, you may end up with large attachments on the test result. This could be attached by hand, but more commonly it will be output from a data collector. Some of the data collectors create files of substantial size due...

New to TFS in VS2010 is the concept of work item categories. Previously, a work item was known only by its name, and it was up to the user to distinguish what a work item was meant to represent based on the name. Out of the box, a work item may have the...

On a previous post by David Williamson, Activity Centers , created on Oct 26th (2009), it was mentioned that Microsoft Test and Lab Manager (MTLM) has a Plan center group, where you can organize your suites/tests, and a Test center group, where you actually...

Imagine a new tester starts working on your team. One of the first things you’ll need to do to help them get ramped up is to have them install Microsoft Test and Lab Manager (MTLM) and then connect to the right server (with or without SSL), port, project...

Microsoft Test and Lab Manager (MTLM) is, for the most part, a single instance application. That is, if you open it a second time from the Start Menu while an instance is already running, the previous instance is brought to the foreground. You will not...

In my last post , I discussed whether Manage Queries is a manager or artifact, and promised to cover other aspects of behavior. One such distinction of behavior between managers and artifacts is that artifacts show up in Open Items. Managers are just...

If the most recognizable part of MTLM for anybody who is familiar with VS’s Team Explorer from 2005 and 2008 is the work item, the next most recognizable piece of UI would be Manage Queries . This view is akin to the Work Items node in Team Explorer....