Ed Glas's blog on VSTS load testing

Increasing the ROI of our Automation

A while back I posted this on automation. I want to resurface this topic now, as it has been on my mind a lot lately as we develop dev10. What is the “right” approach for automation? How do we make it pay off?

Automation is hugely important for us. It enables us to ensure our software works on a myriad of OS (XP, Vista, Win7, Server 2003, Server 2008), processor architecture (x86, ia64), and language (English, German, Japanese, Chinese, etc.) combinations.

At the end of the day, return on investment is what it is all about. Is it faster to develop and maintain an automated test case, or simply run the tests manually? If over the lifetime of a test case you spend more time fixing it than it would have taken to run the test manually for each time you ran the automated test, that test has not paid off. This is basic and obvious, but often times get overlooked when considering automation.

Going back a bit in history to the VS 2005 release when we initially introduced load testing, we made a few huge mistakes with our approach to automation, mistakes which I see others repeating over and over:

1. My test team wrote automation exclusively using UI automation.
2. My test team owned developing and maintaining the automation.
3. Dev “unit tests” were not considered “automation”.
4. Devs and testers used different test automation frameworks.

With dev10, we have reversed each of these, and are benefitting greatly from it.

One thing I really want to emphasize is the cost of maintaining our UI automation. I have not looked at the exact number, but in the course of developing dev10 nearly every single UI automation test case has broken. Contrast that with our tests that test at the API layer, I estimate that fewer than 10% have broken. To add insult to injury, the UI tests are hugely expensive to fix. API tests that break nearly always give compile errors, which are easy to fix. UI tests do not fail until you run them, and then you have to grovel through the test log to figure out what UI controls have changed to cause the failure, make a fix, rerun the test (perhaps to find another failure), all of which is extremely time consuming.

Increasing our ROI: A Cost-Based Approach to Automation

For dev10, we have developed four methodologies for automation, and consider each when considering how to automate testing of particular functionality. We give preference to the lowest cost approach. That is, if we can use a cheaper approach to automate, we do it that way and we don’t automate everything through the UI. In fact, the UI is the least favored approach, and is only done if none of the other approaches will give us the coverage we need. The approaches, in order of preference, are:

1. Unit tests that run in the test process. Really “unit test” is a misnomer for most of these tests, as they typically test a broader area than a pure unit test. I prefer to call these tests API tests. The defining characteristics of these tests is that they are hosted by the test process.
   
   An example of this for our load test product is we have tests that run requests through our web test engine.
   
   Another example is in our TCM server product. Nearly all of the automation for TCM server has been developed using this approach.
    
2. Command line tests. With this approach we have “unit tests” that spawn our command line. The test code then waits for the command to complete, and then uses APIs to validate the command did the right thing. We use this approach for both web and load test features and for our TCM server.
   
   For example, for load tests we have tests that run a load test from the command line, then access the load test database to ensure the results were as expected. This gives us substantial coverage of our web and load test feature set.
   
3. API tests that run in the process under test. mstest has a feature that enables processes other than vstesthost.exe to host the test code. An example of this is ASP.NET unit tests, which run in the ASP.NET process. We take advantage of this extensibility point to add our client processes as host processes.
   
   
   An example of this is we run our new TCM test client Camano (aka Microsoft Test and Lab Manager) as a test host. This is a bit of a mind bender, but we also actually run VS as a test host! So devenv starts vstesthost which starts a second copy of devenv. Once VS is loaded, our test code runs and has access to our architectural layer “just beneath the glass” and enables us to run web and load tests in the IDE (e.g. open a project, open and edit load tests in the project, run them, validate the UI through code).
   
4. UI Automation. With this approach, our test code instantiates the client under test, and drives it through the mouse and keyboard (we drive VS through MSAA, and we drive our TCM client using UIA).

The cost of UI automation is at least an order of magnitude greater than the other three approaches. Isn’t it ironic that we are introducing a new UI automation test type in dev10. If UI tests are so bad, why are we bringing them to market? While I maintain that they are very expensive, UI tests are also absolutely necessary. There are some things we simply cannot test without them (like dialogs, or some integrated, cross-process end-to-end scenarios). But if I go back and look at the UI tests we developed for web and load tests in VS 2005, the vast majority of them could have been implemented using a cheaper alternative.

Engineering for Automation: Developing Testable Software

Developing these other automation approaches did not come for free. We have deliberately architected our software to enable each of these approaches, and spent time developing test frameworks and reference patterns for each approach. It has really paid off in a big way. If you look at our TCM tests, we maintain an extremely high pass rate (98% plus). Our “legacy” UI tests from the 2005 release are in bad shape.

Whose job is it anyway?

At the end of the day, it is the test team’s job to help us understand whether or not we are ready to ship. Automation plays a huge role in that, since we are able to run our automation suites unattended and generate test results relatively quickly and concurrently on many different configurations. The test team is responsible for ensuring we have the right set of automation in place help us understand where we are at.

Getting Testers and Developers on the Same Page

However, it is not solely the test team’s job to develop and maintain the automation. The test team develops the test plan, which includes the scenarios and functionality we want to automate, but both the dev and test team develop and maintain the automation. If a developer is writing “unit tests” for a new API they are developing, they work off the test plan to develop one of the specified test cases. Tester do not duplicate this effort by developing “their own” automation to cover. A key tenet is that testers and developers use the same frameworks and methodologies for developing automation. Testers are able to run tests developed by devs, and visa-versa. Going back to the mistakes we made in VS 2005, this simple methodology, along with considering the most cost-effective way to automate a given test case, is the key to fixing each of these mistakes.

Similarly, it is the entire team’s job to maintain the automated tests. As I said earlier, maintenance is the hidden and huge cost of doing automation. Devs must fix any compile errors in tests introduced by their changes, and also must ensure that all P1 tests pass before checking in. Testers and devs share the load on ensuring all P2 and P3 tests maintain a high pass rate. We run these once a week and distribute the load on driving them to passing.

I hope you can also learn from our mistakes, and use our experience to improve your approach to automation.

Ed.

Read this Before Running a Load Test with Dev10 Beta 1

If you install the dev10 beta 1 on the same machine as VS 2008, and you are running load tests, read this.

When you run the first load test, the load test will check the schema of the load test database, and if it is the 2008 schema it will update the schema in place.

This will create problems for you in VS 2008: you will no longer be able to import and export results.

The workaround is to use two separate databases for your results, one for VS 2008, one for VS 2010. The new Excel reporting feature in dev10 looks for the load test database (we’re fixing that in beta2), so the best workaround is to rename the VS 2008 load test database.

Before running any 2010 load test on your machine, rename the VS 2008 load test database:

1. Close all Visual Studio instances.
2. Run a Visual Studio command prompt as Administrator (can be 2008 or 2010).
3. Run
   sqlcmd –S .\sqlexpress
   1> EXEC sp_renamedb 'LoadTest', 'LoadTest2008'
   2> GO
4. Start Visual Studio 2008
5. Run Test | Administer Test Controllers
6. Change the load test results store to the renamed database
   1. Click …
   2. Under “Select or Enter a Database Name” type “LoadTest2008”

If you run VS 2010 tests prior to renaming the database, you will need to remove the dev10 results from the database:

1. From Visual Studio 2010, open a load test.
2. Click Open and Manage Test Results icon
3. Select the 2010 test results and click export.
4. Delete the 2010 test results.
5. Go through the steps above to create two databases.
6. Open VS 2010 and use Open and Manage Test Results to import the 2010 results back into the database.
7. Delete the extra columns created in your database. We’ll blog a script for doing that soon.

Note the same thing will happen during setup if you install the Test Controller – controller setup will update the existing 2008 load test database. So be sure to rename the database before running controller setup.

Ed.

New Performance Testing Training Available from RTTS

RTTS, a premier testing consultancy and test tools training company, now has training available for performance and load testing with VSTS 2008. RTTS specializes in providing software quality services, and offers training on a variety of tools. It is great to see VSTS in the mix as they see demand for VSTS growing. RTTS offers VSTS performance testing training onsite, over the web, or at their site, as well as consulting services. More details available here.

Ed.

More posts on Testing SharePoint with VSTS

Shivaji Nagarajan has extensive experience testing SharePoint using VSTS, and has captured what he has learned in a series of blog posts. Be sure to check them out if you are testing SharePoint!

Ed.

dynaTrace Leverages new Extensibility Points to Provide Deep Integration with Dev10

A fantastic example of a partner taking advantage of the new extensibility points in Web test playback and load tests in dev10 is provided by dynaTrace. dynaTrace has developed an extension that provides enables you to drill from a particular request to the PurePath for that request. The PurePath provides a tiered performance breakdown for the request, detailing how much time the request spent at each tier of your application. Check out Andreas’s post on the integration (including some code samples!).

Ed.

Are You Reporting Inaccurate Performance Numbers with VS 2008?

There’s a hidden problem with VS 2008 load testing that you need be aware if you are running tests locally (as opposed to using a controller and agents).

If you purchase and run a load agent, load agents run on all cores and all CPUs on the machine.

However, when running locally VS limits load generation to one core on the machine. If this core is running at or close to 100% CPU utilization, it will throw off performance measurements and interfere with performance counter collection. In general it really invalidates your test results. This is why we graph agent CPU by default, and have performance counter thresholds that fire to warn you if the test is running too hot. However, by default the test is configured to look at the _Total instance, when it should be looking at the “0” instance.

This screen shot really tells the story:

CPU 0 is clearly pegged:

Yet the CPU counter in the load test is reporting ~50% utilization:

‘

What is going on here is that the counter reported on is the _Total counter.

To get an accurate measurement we should graph the instance 0 counter instead.

To change your tests to graph the instance 0 counter, change the counter instance in the load test editor:

Now if I re-run, alarm bells should go off as thresholds violations. But they don’t!

The reason is the analyzer is still displaying the _Total instance by default. However, you can see the threshold violation is now firing:

To graph instance 0, drill into the counter tree and drag it on the graph:

Now you can see the threshold violations displayed on the graph. To graph the "0" instance by default, edit the .loadtest file in the xml editor and change the instance:

      <DefaultCountersForAutomaticGraphs>
        <DefaultCounter CategoryName="Processor" CounterName="% Processor Time" InstanceName="0"/>
        <DefaultCounter CategoryName="Memory" CounterName="Available MBytes"/>
      </DefaultCountersForAutomaticGraphs>

You can fix this for all subsequent load tests you create by editing the <installdir>\Common7\IDE\Templates\LoadTest\CounterSets\AgentCounterSet.CounterSet file and adding a new instance tag for the “0” instance:

<CounterCategory Name="Processor">
  <Counters>
    <Counter Name="% Processor Time">
      <ThresholdRules>
        <ThresholdRule Classname="Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.WebStress.Rules.ThresholdRuleCompareConstant, Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.LoadTest">
          <RuleParameters>
            <RuleParameter Name="AlertIfOver" Value="True" />
            <RuleParameter Name="WarningThreshold" Value="90" />
            <RuleParameter Name="CriticalThreshold" Value="95" />
          </RuleParameters>
        </ThresholdRule>
      </ThresholdRules>
    </Counter>
    <Counter Name="% Privileged Time" />
    <Counter Name="% User Time" />
  </Counters>
  <Instances>
    <Instance Name="_Total" />
    <Instance Name="0" />
  </Instances>
</CounterCategory>

Also change the settings for the default counters to show on the graph:

      <DefaultCountersForAutomaticGraphs>
        <DefaultCounter CategoryName="Processor" CounterName="% Processor Time" InstanceName="0"/>
        <DefaultCounter CategoryName="Memory" CounterName="Available MBytes"/>
      </DefaultCountersForAutomaticGraphs>

Hope that helps, and we certainly will get this fixed for dev10 (but the fix did not make it into beta1).

Ed.

Elevating the Role of the Tester with Visual Studio 2010

I am very excited and proud to introduce the new testing features you’ll find in Visual Studio 2010. In addition to continuing to work on the performance testing tools, I have also been focusing on delivering a new set of products for the entire test team. Since most testing is done manually, we have really focused on the manual testers with this release. If you do testing or test management you will love the new features. We also are introducing a new solution for UI automation as well as improvements in web, load, and unit testing, and our testing framework.

We have been working on this since before we shipped VS 2008, it is great to (finally) get the beta out. When we set out to define this release, we set forth a set of what we call value props that capture the value in the release. Using these as the frame, we built up the architecture and feature set to match.

In this post, I’ll go over the over-arching themes for the test tools in dev10. Our GM Amit Chatterjee has a terrific set of posts on each of these feature areas on his blog, be sure to check those out (I’ve linked to them throughout this post). Also be sure to check out the beta version of our documentation, which takes a refreshing approach to product documentation.

Introduction to Team Test for Dev10

Visual Studio Team Test (VSTT10) for Dev10 introduces key new functionality for test management, manual testing, test lab management, and automated testing. Specifically,

• VSTT10 introduces an entirely new tester-focused UI that will free Manual Testers from what they see as the developer-centric Visual Studio UI. This new UI (code named Camano) will be the console for test case authoring, management, execution and tracking.
• VSTT10 takes virtual test lab management to new heights by allowing virtual lab creation, configuration and deployment all integrated into the testing experience.
• VSTT10 significantly increases our investment in the Specialist Tester role by improving the capabilities and performance of load and web testing as well as introducing new UI automation capabilities through the Visual Studio IDE.

VSTT10 introduces substantial new value propositions for software testers:

1. Make manual testers more effective by integrating test activity into the ALM and providing tools for managing, developing, recommending and executing tests.
2. Enable manual testers to reliably and consistently create actionable bug reports via automatic data gathering, reducing debugging time and eliminating non-reproducible bugs.
3. Ensure that both requirements and source code are adequately and transparently tested, ultimately answering the question "can we release?"
4. Enable efficient collaboration between QA and the rest of the extended development team throughout all phases of the application lifecycle.
5. Foster a collaborative tester community with an extensible platform that makes it easy to create and share new features and components that further enhance a tester’s productivity and effectiveness.

The core VSTT10 areas of test management, manual testing, lab management, and automated testing cut across each of these value propositions and create lasting value for test and development teams.

Getting the Basics Right

VSTT10 lays the foundation to help you the tester be more effective at the essential aspects of your job. The idea is to “get the basics right” and create a toolset that appeals to all test teams as well as the extended development team. You can watch an overview video here. 

An Emphasis on Test Management and Manual Testing

In talking to you, our customers, we found that many of you track your testing effort using ad-hoc means and informal tools like Excel or Word. Most testing is performed manually by what we are calling generalist testers. To this end, the main focus for VSTT10 is to offer solid test case management tooling as well as a differentiating experience for manual testing. Because we are targeting generalist testers and test managers, we chose to develop a new client outside of the Visual Studio shell. We really wanted to provide a simple, focused experience for testers, and found we could not effectively do that with VS. We think you are going to really like the new client.

TFS-based Test Planning and Authoring

VSTT10 integrates deeply with TFS to offer rich functionality for test planning and authoring. Test planning features enable the test manager to define which test cases to run as part of a specific test plan or testing effort. VSTT10 also incorporates test case authoring, including the ability to define test steps, attachments and to factor and re-use parts of tests into shared steps. Test cases also allow the manual tester to associate data with the test case making it easy to step through different rows of data within the same test case.

A tester adds structure to their test plans by organizing test cases into hierarchical test suites. Query-based suites are used to automatically include any test case that meets specific criteria.

Test configurations allow the tester to define valid configurations that will be covered in a test plan, and then assign which tests will run on which configurations. Again the recurring theme is to better organize a tester to perform more rigorous testing, and track which configurations have or have not been tested.

Test cases are assigned to different testers on a project and tracked by a test manager to allow for better team organization and management of the test effort during the testing phase.

Linking Test Cases to Requirements and Bugs

Test cases are easily linked to requirements, which enables test planning, test execution, and traceability. Linking requirements to test cases also enables rich reporting, such as the count of test cases per requirement and pass/fail/not run testing status per requirement. A tester can easily add a requirements-based suite to a test plan, which automatically adds any test case linked to the requirement to the test plan.

When a new bug is filed while testing, the bug is automatically linked to the test case that generated it. This enables the developer to quickly open the test case that generated the bug, as well as interesting reports on which test cases generate the most bugs.

Documentation links: Managing New Testing Efforts with Team Test, Defining your testing effort using test plans

A Great Manual Testing Experience

The VSTT10 client offers a differentiating and highly productive manual testing experience. The capabilities around bug capture alone are not to be found in any competitors offering and will substantially increase productivity around bug finding, reporting and triaging. . In addition, the tester can easily capture screen shots, mark tests or steps as pass/fail and manage their bug finding techniques at a level not possible in other tools.

A key differentiator for manual testing is in fast forward manual testing. This innovative feature enables a tester to automatically record during testing, and then replay these actions the next time that same test is run. Automation can also be associated with shared steps, enabling testers to fast-forward through common steps that are repeated across test cases. This will allow testers to quickly fill in form fields and other types of repetitive data entry activity by replaying the form fill actions recorded in previous tests. The idea is to increase productivity by focusing automation on repetitive tasks and freeing a tester to concentrate on finding bugs and gaining better test coverage.

Documentation links:

Creating manual test cases, Running Manual Tests with Test Runner, Recording and Playing Back Manual Tests

Are We Ready to Ship?

A key goal for test managers is answering the question “are we ready to ship?” Arguably, answering this question is the primary mission of a test team, and doing so has many facets. The test team must shine a light in dark places of the application under test in order to find problems before customers do. This becomes as much an exercise in understanding what hasn’t been tested as what has. To that end, the VSTT10 will collect and report data to answer questions like:

• Do we have adequate test coverage of our requirements and features?
• Have we run all our tests?
• Have we tested all of our target configurations adequately?
• Have we tested the feature areas adequately?
• Have we tested the changes?
• What are we missing in our regression suite?
• Are we on track to complete our testing?

To answer these questions, VSTT10 makes it easy to:

• Define and organize test cases.
• Define and manage which test cases are to be executed in a test effort.
• Link test cases to requirements and features, and associate them with areas of the application.
• Manage which configurations test cases are run on.
• Seamlessly track which tests have been authored and run, and for those that have been run track pass/fail.
• View which tests have been impacted by code changes.
• View reports which surface this data to enable the test manager to answer the questions above.

VSTT10 achieves this by allowing the tester to define relationships of test cases to requirements and bugs in TFS, and to define the set of test cases and configs to run as part of a test plan. VSTT10 then seamlessly captures test results, ultimately storing this data in the TFS warehouse.

A basic set of reports are available through the process template and hosted on the SharePoint portal.Data is surfaced through reports on top of TFS. Since the data is in the TFS warehouse, reporting services or Excel reporting can be used to flexibly mine the data. A very rich set of data is available and can be related to metrics and measures currently captured by a product team. The warehouse stores test results over the life of a project, and those results can be sliced by build, area path, suite, and configuration.

This allows a test manager and stakeholders to generate reports such as the set of tests run for a given plan, the set of tests not run a given plan, and for those that were run what the results were. Historical results are available in the warehouse, providing stake holders rich visualizations of testing activity and quality trends.

Because test data can be related to requirements, a test manager can generate reports that show pass/fail per requirement, the number of bugs per requirement, test results per area, per suite, per build, and so forth. In all a very rich set of information is available in VSTT10. Check out Amit’s blog post on reporting.

Collaboration with Dev

VSTT10 provides tight integration between developers and testers through the free flow of information between them. Not only can developers and testers share the information stored in TFS, but information required by developers from ongoing testing is gathered automatically as described below. Also for the first time developers can get visibility into which areas of the product have and haven’t been tested, and better understand where their features are at.

Actionable Bug Capture

The basic flow of information from testers to developers is primarily through bugs. The effort wasted chasing down bugs and reproducing errant behavior is a severe pain point for developers and testers alike. “It works on my box” is the norm. VSTT10 takes this on head-on through information rich bug capture.

In order to enable this rich flow of information, VSTT10 delivers an innovative technology called data collectors. Data collectors enable testers to collect information from client and server machines in the test lab while they are testing. Data collectors enable a wide range of scenarios, including rich bug capture.

As test environments can be very complicated, and not all testers are experts at configuring the server system, an important aspect of data collectors is that they “just work” out of the box and are easy to configure and use.

A case in point is an essential new technology for bug capture known as Historical Debugging, which enables developers to debug exactly what was going on on a machine at the time a bug occurred.

As useful as historical debugging is to developers, the Action Recorder is a technology useful for developers and testers alike. It is based on VSTT10’s UI automation recorder, and captures user actions the tester takes and records that information as part of the bug report. The Screen Capture tool enables the tester to easily take screen captures, and the Video Recorder records the testers desktop and links the video to the bug.

Documentation links: Setting Up Machines and Diagnostic Information to be Collected Using Test Settings, Creating A Diagnostic Data Adapter to Collect Custom Data or Impact a Test System

The Essential Role of Builds

As bugs represent the primary flow of information form test to dev, the flow from developers to testers is through the build. Testers pick up new builds to get new features and requirements to test and bugs to regress. The developers’ efforts are realized in the build. As such the build becomes fulcrum of the dev/test relationship and takes a first class role in the VSTT10 product. When selecting a new build, the test manager sees which work items were completed as part of the build and act on those. She sees which tests were impacted by changes in the build and assign them to be run. The ability to see impacted tests is especially important in the end-game just before releasing to production, when the test manager and stakeholders need to make sure they have adequately tested the bug fixes that were made in the final builds.

Documentation links: Recommending Tests to Run That are Affected by Code Changes, Determining Which Builds Have Bug Fixes, New Features or Requirements

Preparing the Test Environment

The build is also central to ensuring high quality builds are passed to testers and assists in preparing the test environment for new builds. VSTT10 enables integration with VMM and Windows Workflow for automated provisioning and setting up the test environment as part of the build process. With VSTT10 build and deployment engineers can define a workflow script to provision machines from VMM, install the latest build, and then run functional BVT tests against the installed build. These can then be leverage by both the development and test teams to quickly set up complicated test environments. VS 2008 limited the level of testing to unit testing of assemblies whereas VSTT10 enables full functional build verification testing.

Testers leverage test environments from within the test client to quickly re-use environments. Network fencing enables testers to have more than one instance of the same VM running at the same time. This enables one person on the test or development team to get a test environment set up, and others on the team to quickly clone the environment for testing.

Test Automation in VSTT10

Test automation is a key and strategic investment area for VSTT10. Every test team wants to be more efficient, and automation is one way to increase efficiency. A goal for VSTT10 is to enable teams to define and run a automated regression suites to validate their primary scenarios are still intact. These automated regression suites are then used both as build verification tests and as a final set of regression tests to run before shipping.

The Record and Playback Engine

A primary investment in VSTT10 is the record and playback engine, which is leveraged in both automated tests and the fast forward for manual testing feature. A great deal of engineering has gone into ensuring record and playback “just works”. Record and Playback supports IE, Winforms, and WPF front ends. Silverlight support and playback on Firefox are planned for an out of band release (between dev10 and dev11). The RnP technology also supports a rich extensibility mechanism for extending to custom controls within these UI technologies as well as new browsers and future UI frameworks. This technology provides the underpinnings for our future UI Automation solutions.

UI Automation

VSTT10 includes a new “Coded UI” UI automation test type which is available in Visual Studio. Coded UI tests are squarely targeted at the more sophisticated end of the specialist tester segment, as it requires development skills. The “Coded UI” test type provides an action recorder, validation tool, and comprehensive API.

Coded UI Tests are built on the mstest unit testing framework, providing a familiar and common paradigm for testers and developers. Test authors leverage the full power of VS, the .NET framework, and managed languages to develop their automation.

Managing Automated Tests

Test management capabilities enable testers to track which test cases have or have not been automated, and to track automated test results over time. As part of the ability to scale-up test execution, VSTT10 enables you to define and run automated suites that span across VS solutions.

Documentation links: How to: Associate an Automated Test With a Manual Test Case and Run It, How to: Create Test Cases from an Assembly of Automated Tests

Performance Testing in VSTT10

VSTT10 builds on the success of VSTT 2008 performance testing tools, with innovative new tools that help testers find performance problems and enable development to fix them.

VSTT10 introduces WAN emulation for both manual and automated performance testing. Network emulation enables you to see how your application will perform over a slow link.

New advances in Web Performance Tests (formerly known as Web tests) make it far easier to debug them, and powerful new extensibility hooks in the web test recorder enable custom rules that can be targeted at specific types of sites so that record/playback will “just work” against those sites.

Load tests leverage data collector collectors to collect information from the system under test during a load test. A significant advancement in this area is the ability to remotely collect a profiler trace from the system under test, enabling testers to collect code-level performance data from the server during the test, so developers will have enough information to fix performance bugs.

The timing details view enables the performance tester to visualize virtual user activity, and quickly drill into a complete virtual user session log from a failed iteration. And new advances in reporting will enable you to easily share performance test results and trends with your team.

Advances in MSTest

Dev10 introduces significant advances in mstest extensibility, with new APIs for executing tests and getting results. This enables many new scenarios, including introducing new test clients outside of visual studio.

Dev10 also introduces test categories, which enable you to categorize tests (think tagging them) and dynamically select a set of tests that are in a particular category. A test can belong to multiple categories at a time. This enables you to move away from static vsmdi test lists, providing a richer way of selecting tests for BVTs.

Mapping Value Props to Feature Areas

1. Make manual testers more effective by integrating test activity into the ALM and providing tools for managing, developing, recommending and executing tests.
2. Enable manual testers to reliably and consistently create actionable bug reports via automatic data gathering, reducing debugging time and eliminating non-reproducible bugs.
3. Ensure that both requirements and source code are adequately and transparently tested, ultimately answering the question "can we release?"
4. Enable efficient collaboration between QA and the rest of the extended development team throughout all phases of the application lifecycle.
5. Foster a collaborative tester community with an extensible platform that makes it easy to create and share new features and components that further enhance a tester’s productivity and effectiveness.

Conclusion

As you can see from this paper, this is a compelling release! But don’t take my word for it, try it out! Download dev10 beta1 today. You’ll need to download and install TFS server. The new test client is installed with VSTS in beta 1 (we are working on a stand-alone installer for beta 2). Once you have the product installed, here is a Quick Start Guide to get you up and running.

Dev10 Beta 1 Available!

Beta 1 was released to the web today for MSDN subscribers. If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can download the Beta today from here.

We have been very busy on this release of late (one reason why my blog posts have slowed down lately :))

My team and I will be blogging about all the great new features in dev10 beta 1 over the coming weeks.

As in the past, I will compose a list of links to any posts on the new features and update this blog post with the links as we get them.

New Web Test Features in Dev10:

• These features are about making it easier to get web test playback working:
• Extensible recorder plugins for modifying recorded web tests (including adding custom dynamic parameter correlation)
• Find in playback
• View recording log in playback
• Jump to request from playback
• Add extraction rule from playback
• WebTestResult in a separate file for better scalability
• New API for web test result
• New extensibility API in playback enables UI extensions to playback
• File Upload record/playback just works
• Uploaded file added to project and deployed
• Option for generating a unique file name on each iteration
• Looping and branching in web test
• New dialog for editing think times, goals, reporting string across all requests
• New validation and extraction rules for inner text and select tags
• Test level validation rule for pages meeting response time goal

New features in Load Test in Dev10:

• Logging and data collection improvements
• Log entire test result on test failure or log entire result every n requests
• Remote profiler integration
• Event Log Data Collection
• Extensible data collectors to support more platforms
• Analysis Improvements
• Load test virtual user activity visualization
• Reporting
• Run to run perf reports in Microsoft Excel
• Performance testing
• Run automated UI tests as performance tests
• True network emulation
• More flexible load modeling
• New Sequential Test Mix
• Delay start on scenario
• Iteration count on scenario
• Select which agent(s) to run the scenario on
• Disable during warmup
• Multiple load test plugins
• 64 bit test execution

In addition to continuing our testing and bug fixing efforts, right now we’re working on an additional set of features for beta 2. I’ll have to sit on those until beta2. :)

Ed.

Great resources for SharePoint performance testing

Sanjay Narang has compiled a great set of links on performance testing SharePoint. Check them out! This list is not specific to VSTS, and includes tool-agnostic white papers, official documentation, links to performance testing results, tooling (including VSTS), etc.

Ed.

New, comprehensive technical documentation available for Web, Load, and Unit Tests

The VSTS Ranger team, led by Geoff Gray, just published the VSTT Quick Reference Guide 1.0.

This is a comprehensive collection of technical information on VSTT –- 83 pages of information!!! Many questions you may have on how stuff works in web, load, and unit test are answered in this doc. This doc is a must have for anyone working in VSTT.

Geoff and his team, the Microsoft Services Test Labs, deliver professional services for doing performance testing. They are experts at the tools, and work closely with my team (the product team) both to troubleshoot issues as they come up and to help steer the product in the right direction. Whenever Geoff saw an answer in email, figured it out himself, or saw it on a blog post, he put it in the document. He has been building it up over the past few years. I highly recommend you refer to it any time you are looking for more information or are stuck trying to get something to work in the product.

Here’s an extract from the document:

Congrats Geoff on getting this published! And thanks to others who helped along the way, and to Bijan Javidi for your support in sponsoring this project to get it published.

Ed.

Updated Load Test Links for March

I’ve updated my Load Test Links post with links to new posts, as well as added some links to content that has been around but I just didn’t have linked.

New links:

Reading Performance Counters on Vista and Server 2008 Machines

How to run Web and Load Tests from the Command-Line

Scriptable Parameter Values in web tests

How is the user load adjusted for a load test with a goal based load pattern?

Other links I added:

Load Agent and Load Controller Installation and Configuration Guide (can’t believe I didn’t have this one linked)

Web and Load Testing with Visual Studio Team System

Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications

Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability

Professional Software Testing with Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Tools for Software Developers and Test Engineers

Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System

Using VSTS Test and Profilers to troubleshoot a High CPU in GC issue

Using VSTS Test and Profilers to troubleshoot performance issues (low cpu hang)

Ed. 

New Web test rules on codeplex.com\TeamTestPlugins

We just released 1.2 of our codeplex rules, adding the following rules:

ExtractText2
QueryStringExtractionRule
ValidateCookie
ValidateMultipleCookies
ValidateResponseBody
CRM4Correlation web test plugin

These rules use HtmlAgiltyPack (you must download this assembly separately from codeplex.com/HtmlAgilityPack to use the rules):

ValidateXPathValue
ValidateMultipleXPathValues
ValidateTagValue

Thanks to Taavi Koosaar and Gaurav Bhandari for their contributions!

Ed.

Amit Chatterjee, new Team Test blogger

Amit Chatterjee, General Manager of the VS Test Business, recently started blogging and has a post that gives a great overview of Visual Studio load testing. Check it out.

Ed.

VSTS wins Testers Choice in for .NET Apps in Software Test and Performance Magazine

The annual testers choice awards are out in STP magazine, and VSTS took top spot in two categories in this years tester's choice poll, winning out over load runner for ".NET Performance Testing" and for "Integrated Test/Performance Suite".

Congrats to the team who worked so hard on VS 2008 product, it's great to see our customers like the tool.

I'm dissapointed with the product write up in the magazine, it doesn't mention our load testing solution at all. Edward Correia, we need to talk! :) For a good overview of our performance testing solution, see Amit Chatterjee's recent blog post.

VS 2008 is a fine release, but there is still plenty of work to do! I expect our product line will continue to rise up in other categories as well with our next release. We have a fantastic set of new products for general testing on the runway, plus a ton of new performance testing features in Visual Studio Team Test. It's good to see TFS get the second place vote for defect tracking, I'm sure that as we expand our product line to appeal to all testers we will become the top choice in this and the test management category as well.

Ed.

Make Your Performance Work Count: The 20% Guideline

I recently read Steve Seow's book, Designing and Engineering Time: The Psychology of Time Perception in Software. Steve is an expert on performance engineering at Microsoft, and really understands the human element and psychology behind software performance.

A really interesting take-away is that users do not notice changes in performance below a certain threshold. Research has shown that for durations under 30 seconds, users do not detect differences up to 18%. Steve's rule of thumb is that users really won't notice performance changes of +/- 20%. So if you are looking at setting goals for a performance improvement, or considering performance against a competitive product, your goals should be to gain at least 20% over the baseline measurement.

Likewise if you are considering whether or not to fix a performance regression, 20% is a good measurement to consider. If the regression is less than 20%, users likely won't detect the degradation, so you may be better off spending your effort elsewhere.

Of course this is a slippery slope. If each release you allow a 20% degradation, users certainly will notice and stop using your software. So it is important to maintain and meet performance goals that will keep your users happy with your software. One of my performance testing customers ends his emails with this quote:

"If it is fast and ugly, they will use it and curse you; if it is slow, they will not use it."

-David Cheriton in _The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis_

Ed.