Jeff Beehler's Blog : Unit testing

Team Test 2008 Quick Reference Guide now available

jeffbe — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:54:21 GMT

The Rangers have shipped again! (Faithful readers know just how much I love saying that). This time, led by Geoff Gray, they have put together the VSTT 2008 Quick Reference Guide, a comprehensive technical document about Visual Studio Team Test functionality, specifically focusing on Web, Load and Unit testing. Geoff is a member of our Services Testing Lab, an arm of Microsoft Consulting Services and he’s help putting together this great reference based on his own personal experience using our products in customer settings. As such, it’s chockfull of very helpful advice and best practices informed by real world usage. If you’re at all interested in using our Testing tools, I’d highly recommend taking a look at this guide.

Watch James Whittaker talk about Software Testing

jeffbe — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:11:50 GMT

James Whittaker has recently joined the team responsible for producing Visual Studio Team System Test Edition as an Architect. He’s got years of experience in the testing field and it’s great to have him on board. Brian Keller recently interviewed him for a segment on Channel 9 which is well worth watching. You should also check out the Tester Center which contains even more material from James.

Check out the new Tester Center on MSDN

jeffbe — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 23:07:26 GMT

Testers play a critical role in the successful release of most software projects. However, to date, we haven't done a great job providing test specific information on MSDN. Today, with the introduction of the new Tester Center, that all changes. I encourage you to check it out today!

Some of the features I'm most excited about include:

Whiteboard videos - short focused conversations about typical topics that testers encounter on a daily basis. I appreciate the conversational tone and the fact that they're linked directly to forum posts for further discussion.
Testing experts - looking at the list of testing experts the team has amassed to support this effort with new content is stunning. You can expect to see them blogging, writing articles, making videos and answering forum posts.
Test column - ask your questions of the experts and get a detailed explanation from one of our experts.
Forum - everywhere you see this icon , it'll take you to forum discussion specifically on that topic. In addition, you can post your own discussion topics for the community to contribute to.

I'm looking forward to seeing this new Center come to life...with your help it can really turn into something great.

Aggregating popular Team System blogs

jeffbe — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 17:02:53 GMT

Blogs have quickly become a primary means for the Team System team to communicate with our community and as a result we have dozens and dozens of valuable blogs from our team. Because of this distributed approach, it’s hard for our customers to navigate and track all of the blogs related to various topics. We’ve also heard from many customers that they tire of the endless cross posts between our blogs…the echo can sometimes be deafening.

To help us dampen the echo and to provide one place for customers to go to learn about their favorite portions of the product, we are now aggregating the best Team System blog articles on each of the role specific Team Centers. As we learn more about how this approach works (and doesn’t work) for us and our customers, we’ll evolve this program. To get us started, I have identified key posts and posters to help us kick off this program. Please take a look, subscribe to your favorite feeds and let us know if this help you to stay in touch with us better.

Thanks!

jeff

Team System (rss)

Architect (rss)

VSArch

Developer (rss)

Test (rss)

Database (rss)

TFS (rss)

Project Manager (rss)

Team_WIT_Tools

Upcoming Team System webcasts

jeffbe — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 02:36:00 GMT

Adam Gallant recently posted a listing of many Team System webcasts that are scheduled for the next 10 months or so. Some of them look really interesting...maybe I'll listen in and learn something too! His blog has a full listing...I've just included the Team System related broadcasts here:

Whew!

Watch our TechEd 2007 sessions

jeffbe — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:29:00 GMT

The Team System team and community delivered quite a few talks at TechEd 2007 last month and I'm happy to announce that the recordings of these sessions, demos and all, are now available on the web for your viewing enjoyment. Here's a quick listing:

DEV347: Unit Testing and Test Driven Development: Brian Randell and Doug Seven
DEV309: Best Practices for Team-Based Software Development: Joel Semeniuk
ARC303: Building Your Own Software Factory: Edward Bakker and Jezz Santos
DEV313: Improving Code Performance with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: Marc Popkin-Paine and Steve Carroll
DEV320: Writing Maintainable and Robust Applications with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: Abhijit Rao and Noah Coad
DAT317: Database Schema Versioning: How to Use Microsoft Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals and Team Foundation Server to Version and Deploy Your Databases: Gert Drapers
DEV322: Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (Part 1 of 2): Applying Work Item Tracking and Version Control to Application Lifecycle Management: Brian Harry
DEV336: Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (Part 2 of 2): Customizing Team Foundation Server for Application Lifecycle Management: Jeff Beehler
ARC315: Loose Coupling in Practice: Composite UI Application Block (CAB) in the Real World: David Platt
DEV329: Testing .NET 3.0 Applications with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Test Tools: Mark Michaelis
DEV337: End-to-End Database Development with Microsoft Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals: Duncan Davenport
ARC305: Practice-Centric Software Development with Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server: David West and Ivar Jacobson
DEV210: Microsoft Solutions Framework 4.0 Core and its Families: Rafal Lukawiecki
DEV335: What's New in Microsoft Visual Studio Team System for Testers, New Features in Visual Studio 2008 and Best Practices for Testing AJAX, SharePoint, and Reporting Services: David R. Williamson
DEV321: Best Practices for Deploying and Migrating Projects to Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server: Doug Neumann
DEV301: Integrating the Database into the Application Lifecycle Using Microsoft Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals: Duncan Davenport

I think Noah's talk (with Abhijit demoing) got the highest rating of all of these and of course you've got to watch mine!

Enjoy!

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 is available!

jeffbe — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:07:49 GMT

I'm sure there will be many more posts (from me and others) but I wanted to get the good word out quickly that Visual Studio Beta 2 is now available for download! It's been a long haul but I'm really excited about what we've achieved. I'm confident it's ready for people to really pick up and use on a daily basis. But what really matters is to hear what you think...please let us hear from you!

For more information, please see Soma's announcement. If you just want to get to the bits, please head to our recently redesigned Developer Center on MSDN.

Woohoo!

Team System testing videos available

jeffbe — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 19:48:00 GMT

Here's a great series of testing oriented videos for Team System hosted on the ASP.net site:

#1 | Introduction to Unit Testing with Team System

(10 minutes, 54 seconds)

#2 | Introduction to Testing Web Applications with Team System

(9 minutes, 43 seconds)

#3 | Introduction to Load Testing Web Applications with Team System

(9 minutes, 8 seconds)

#4 | Introduction to Manual Testing with Team System

(8 minutes, 56 seconds)

#5 | Introduction to Managing and Running Tests with Team System

(8 minutes, 37 seconds)

#6 | Measuring the Business Value of AJAX

(10 minutes, 27 seconds)

#7 | Code Coverage of Automated Tests

(6 minutes, 49 seconds)

#8 | Custom Extraction Rules and Coded Web Tests

(12 minutes, 39 seconds)

#9 | The Effects of Caching

(15 minutes, 36 seconds)

#10 | Using the Load Test Agent

(5 minutes, 43 seconds)

#11 | The Effects of ViewState

(10 minutes, 4 seconds)

#12 | How Do I: Integrate Defect Tracking with Testing?

(8 minutes, 2 seconds)

#13 | How Do I: Create My Own Bug Work Item?

(11 minutes, 23 seconds)

#14 | How Do I: Write Code More Quickly with Unit Tests?

(8 minutes, 40 seconds)

#15 | How Do I: Practice Test-Driven Development?

(8 minutes, 21 seconds)

#16 | How Do I: Load Test a Web Application?

(8 minutes, 31 seconds)

#17 | How Do I: Tune Web Application Performance with Profiling?

(8 minutes, 33 seconds)

Overview of Visual Studio Team Developer Tools

jeffbe — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 15:59:44 GMT

At TechEd this year, Noah and Abhijit gave one of the highest ranked talks of the week. I had the pleasure of attending in person to experience their enthusiasm first hand. If you weren't able to attend but you have questions about the latest in team development tools such as Profiling, Unit Testing or Code Analysis, I'd highly recommend taking a look at the artifacts from their session.

Tell us about Beta1

jeffbe — Thu, 10 May 2007 20:57:00 GMT

Brian's asking folks about their reaction to Team System "Orcas" Beta1:

We released Orcas Beta 1 a few weeks ago now and I'm really surprised at how little feedback I've heard. I'm curious what's going on. Are people too busy to mess with it? Has releasing all of the CTPs ahead of time taken the excitment out of playing with the Beta? Is it so unbelievably good that you are stunned into silence? Are you just waiting for Beta 2?

Take a look and let us know what you think. We look forward to hearing from you!

YATSCS: Yet Another Team System Case Study

jeffbe — Thu, 03 May 2007 18:43:00 GMT

These seem to be coming out of the woodwork...I just posted an announcement of three new ones earlier this week and now we have another one. This one's from the Washington State Department of Community, Trade, and Economic Development, and is indicative of a small, 10 person dev shop. Here's a quote:

It’s now easier to answer questions such as, Are requirements being met?, Are my teams adhering to quality standards?, and, Is the product ready? - Jim Cristofono

Check it out for yourself: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=201406

All Orcas Beta1 downloads now available

jeffbe — Thu, 03 May 2007 16:01:10 GMT

I'm happy to announce that all of the Visual Studio Team System "Orcas" Beta1 downloads are now available. The VPC images were available a couple weeks ago but last night we finally got the self extracting installer images available for folks that want to install the product themselves on their own machines. As I've said in previous posts, Orcas Beta1 is the best first beta release we've issued in a long time...we're using parts of it internally and I have no complaints so far.

So, please take it for a spin and let us know what you think. We're currently in the process of testing early Beta2 builds and fixing the bugs we've found so your timely feedback will certainly help us ensure that Beta2 is even better. Please let us know what you think through Connect or leave a comment here...we're really eager to hear from you.

Three more Team System case studies available

jeffbe — Wed, 02 May 2007 02:55:58 GMT

With three new case studies available, we bring the total number for Team System to five:

New! KBC Bank used Microsoft Visual Studios Team System and Team Foundation Server to improve application-building methodologies, increase productivity, and accelerate application deployment.
New! EDS used Microsoft Visual Studio Team System to support a more efficient global development strategy, realigning its internal software development assets and improving the productivity of its developers and testers.
New! Dell: By using Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server to deploy a global source code management platform, Dell is able maintain a centralized repository for all source code and provide it to developers on a just-in-time basis regardless of their location. Improved source code management has also enabled Dell to consolidate its source code onto fewer servers, redeploy 100 system administrators, and improve the productivity of its developers.
A social networking Web site used Microsoft Visual Studio Team System to improve the productivity of its developers and project managers as well as to reduce software costs.
A global manufacturer deployed Microsoft Visual Studio Team System to improve the consistency and efficiency of internal software development, enabling it to support adoption of the widely recognized Capability Maturity Model for software development. This enabled the company to increase developer, project manager, and tester productivity while improving software quality.

Each of these presents a compelling case for the benefits of adopting Team System. I don't understand the methodology they use to calculate the ROI...personally I think the most interesting sections are the key benefits / costs and lessons learned.

Enjoy

Another chat - by popular demand

jeffbe — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 00:43:36 GMT

Based on the feedback that we've received on our upcoming chat, we decided to add another session later in the day to accommodate folks in other timezones. Of course it'll be on Saturday in many timezones around the world so hopefully folks will still be able to join us. Here are the two times we'll be chatting:

Join the chat on Friday, April 27th, 2007 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones
Join the chat on Friday, April 27th, 2007 from 4:00pm - 5:00pm Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

In the future, we'll schedule our chats on days other than Fridays to avoid running into the weekend for those of you ahead of us.

Software Testers Deep Dive

jeffbe — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 21:39:00 GMT

We recently ran a bootcamp for some of our internal teams on the testing capabilities of Visual Studio Team System and used a bunch of blog articles already available on the web. Seems like this list might be useful for others so here you go...enjoy! What other resources would you recommend?

Adding an IE7 Browser Template for use by Web Tests

Testing web applications with pop ups

Article Posted: Advanced Load Testing Features of VSTS