Feedback from RichB noted the following:
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Now, as most testers in the wider world are not developers they won't have a copy of Visual Studio on their machine and they also will not know what a code editor looks like. If they don't know what a code editor looks like, they will not need unit testing tools. This is where I believe Microsoft is going wrong.
There's a separate class of testers who are much smaller in number, but more closely resemble Microsoft's warped view of the general testing community. Those people are test harness testers and performance testers. They tend to know less about the business and more about code - and they definately do require tools which will enable them to reproducibly run tests against code (call that unit testing if you will, although it's not common usage).
Therefore, Visual Studio Team Tester targets a small percentage of the QA teams in the wide world.
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Rich, thanks for the comment – you are officially the first viewer response I’ve gotten on my blog!!
I completely agree with your characterization of a segment of the testing community who are not necessarily users of Visual Studio today. As you note, these testers really don’t use pure ‘code editors’ and as a result don’t have much use for today’s Visual Studio and won’t have much use for a unit testing feature set.
One of the goals of Visual Studio Team System is to broaden the functionality of the Visual Studio product family. We’re introducing tools that address not just code specific tasks; we’re introducing functionality targeting the Project Manager, IT Architect, Developers, Testers, Functional QA Tester, and many other roles in the product lifecycle. With VSTS, we expect go beyond the Visual Studio's traditional role as a powerful code editor.
The Unit Testing support I mentioned in my earlier post is only one feature of our Team Tester and Team Developer products. As you correctly point out, our Unit Testing support is specifically targeted at developers and the segment of the test community you referred to as ‘test harness testers’ or sometimes called White Box Testers (people who know the code).
Take for example our Web Tests, these tests allow a user to navigate to a website and browse naturally. Meanwhile, our toolset records all gestures and saves these in the test for the user. The user does not need to write a single line of code. Of course, we allow the user to go into the code if desired, but this is not required. Using our Test Execution features, the user can run this test and literally get the earlier recorded functional scenario in an automated test environment.
Another example non-code specific behavior is in our Manual Tests, these tests enable the user to simply write manual steps for a scenario test using Word or a text editor. These Manual tests (as can all of our test types) can then be assigned to others via our Work Item functionality, integrated with bugs via our defect tracking functionality, or simply saved and used by the single scenario tester in the future.
Also, our partner Compuware has already integrated their functional test product Test Partner into Visual Studio Team System.
Visual Studio Team System really is targeting the wide range of users and roles traditionally found in the product lifecycle. We’ve added features that span both the deeply technical and deeply functional skill sets.
I’ll try to post another response to the rest of your comments later…
For more information, check out:
Our Team site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/
Some of our Testing Demos: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=88F7CB8B-473B-4ED5-BA47-ABBC06D0048E&displaylang=en
Check out the great article by my partner-in-crime Tom Arnold and Paul Schafer: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnvsent/html/vsts-test.asp
