10-4 Episode 23: An Introduction to Manual Testing

2009-06-15T07:56:00Z

Brian Keller has posted a video "An Introduction to Manual Testing" on Channel 9. Check it out here. This is a very nicely done video of the concepts of manual testing leveraging key features of VSTS 2010 Team Test. You can learn about other features of this product at the team blog site here.

Cheers,

Ram

Visual Studio Team System 2010 Beta 1 is released!!

2009-05-21T01:46:00Z

Today, we announced the broad availability of Visual Studio Team System 2010 Beta 1 and it is now available for download. We encourage you to download, evaluate and provide us your feedback. This is the culmination of the work done by the team and we are eagerly looking forward to your feedback. This is your opportunity to influence the direction of the product through the next Beta and release of the product, so do take advantage of this.

Please visit Visual Studio Download Page to find out how to download the beta, how to share your feedback in the forums and how to file a bug.

For upcoming updates visit the Team Test and the Lab Management team blogs.

Ram

New community section on the MSDN site

2008-12-12T04:49:00Z

We just launched a new community section on our MSDN site. You can check it out at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts2008/bb964396.aspx. You can read all about the background story on how this community section came about on Sharon Elkins's blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/selkins/archive/2008/12/10/new-community-section.aspx.

Let us know what you think.

Virtualization.info coverage on Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management

2008-11-19T20:57:00Z

Allesandro Perrilli posted about our recently announced Lab Management product at http://www.virtualization.info/2008/11/microsoft-will-use-visual-studio-2010.html. It has been heartening to see the interest in the community around our Lab Management product announcement and how it leverages SCVMM and Virtualization platforms. I would love to hear about your thoughts on Lab Management as well.

Ram

Implementing and Creating an Effective Test Strategy with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System

2008-11-14T07:42:00Z

Today Euan and I attended the half a day session on the subject at the Bellevue offices of Microsoft.

The invite to the session said:

Today, identifying potential issues in the software development life cycle early is critical to establishing a rhythm of verifying quality early and often. Implementing good software testing practices can lead to cost and resource savings and can be adopted by teams of all sizes. In planning your testing initiative, there are some key questions to ask and strategies to define Test Best Practices for your organization.

Please join Microsoft and Testhouse (Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Inner Circle Partner) for this half-day seminar. Doug Hoffman, American Society for Quality Fellow, Testhouse will provide an overview on how to create and implement an effective test strategy. In addition, senior members of the Microsoft Visual Studio Test Team will lead the discussions on the topics of test case management, tools in Visual Studio 2008, and provide a brief overview of what’s to come in the next version of Visual Studio 2010.

SPEAKER BIO

Douglas Hoffman, MBA, MSEE, BACS, ASQ Fellow
Test House | www.testhouse.net

Douglas Hoffman has over 20 years on experience in the Industry. From Strategic and tactical planning for software quality, through to test automation architectural design and selection and deployment of software tools. A regular speaker at national and international conferences and seminars within the Software Testing field. He has taught many Management and QA courses, published many articles and has ground breaking work based on his implementation and design on Test Automation.

TARGET AUDIENCE

This seminar is intended for Quality Assurance Managers responsible for implementing testing in organizations. Presentation will provide an educational overview of testing strategy; it is not a deep dive technical presentation on software testing.

AGENDA

09:00 AM Introduction

09:15 AM "Best Practice" - Defining the Concept, Doug Hoffman, Testhouse

09:30 AM Testing Technology & Interest, Doug Hoffman, Testhouse

10:30 AM Test Management Leadership, Doug Hoffman, Testhouse

10:45 AM Break

11:00 AM Visual Studio Team Test Tools, Microsoft Visual Studio Test Team

12:00 PM Raffle & Close

I got to the session around 10 AM and saw a room full of Test Managers, Testers eagerly listening to Doug Hoffman pontificate about Testing. I caught the last few minutes of Doug's session on Test Management Leadership. Good stuff on what enables leadership and how TestHouse can help in this space.

During the break I got to introduce myself to Doug and we talked a bit about the work we are doing in the next release of Visual Studio Team System - Visual Studio Team System 2010. We got to talking to another customer about code coverage and other such metrics that could be measured the wrong way causing issues. More about that later.

The most interesting part of the session was when Euan started presenting the very interesting work we are doing in the Team Test and Lab Management products for the upcoming release. Euan talked about our key pillars:

Align QA with the life cycle
Create tighter dev/test interaction
Enable highly leveraged QA orgs

Most of Euan's presentation was around demo of the live bits with very few slides to explain the context. He presented creating a rich bug with detailed steps, system information, associated test case and the attachments. The attachments included a link to the collected event logs, video of the test in action, a screen capture, a link to the historic debugging log. It was evident from looking at the bug how it was clearly actionable and would help reduce if not eliminate the "no repro" bugs and reduce the typical "bug ping-pong" between developers and testers.

Euan's demo session clearly resonated very well with the audience as evidenced by the high scores his session received. Euan also presented a video of the recently announced Lab Management product.I had an opportunity to talk to the network fencing support that enables running multiple copies of the environment at the same time.