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November 2009 - Posts

Wednesday, November 25, 2009 7:14 PM

Planning vs Testing (Part 5 – Final)

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:
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Tuesday, November 24, 2009 7:36 PM

Planning vs Testing (Part 4)

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
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Monday, November 23, 2009 11:02 AM

Recording Hover’s in CodedUITest

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
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Saturday, November 21, 2009 1:04 AM

Order Test Cases

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
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Friday, November 20, 2009 8:14 PM

Planning vs Testing (Part 3)

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
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Friday, November 20, 2009 8:00 AM

The View Toolbar

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
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Thursday, November 19, 2009 9:25 PM

Beta2 online help

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
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Thursday, November 19, 2009 8:09 PM

Artifact Updates

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
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Wednesday, November 18, 2009 9:26 PM

Terry Clancy Posts About Partner Integration Opportunities

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://blogs.msdn.com/terryclancy/archive/2009/11/18/visual-studio-2010-test-tools-partner-integration-opportunities.asp
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Tuesday, November 17, 2009 9:41 PM

Writing Queries for Custom Work Items and Work Item Categories

I talked about customizing work items and how this can be used with categories to get the best out of MTLM 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
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Monday, November 16, 2009 11:26 PM

Planning vs Testing (Part 2)

In a previous blog post , I mentioned some of the reasons why the Planning and Testing views in MTLM 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,
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Monday, November 16, 2009 9:46 PM

Zen and the Art of Test Case Composition

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
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Monday, November 16, 2009 9:29 PM

Copy/Paste Test Steps

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
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Friday, November 13, 2009 11:46 PM

Tell Us What You Think

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
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Friday, November 13, 2009 10:48 PM

Create/Edit Test Settings in Test Plan Properties

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
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Friday, November 13, 2009 7:47 PM

Clearing MTLM’s Settings

With MTLM, 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 MTLM – window size/location, whether the Test Runner is docked or floating,
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Friday, November 13, 2009 8:00 AM

Navigating Back and Forward

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
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Thursday, November 12, 2009 11:07 PM

Working with and customizing work item categories

As this previous post explains, before Microsoft Test and Lab 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
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Thursday, November 12, 2009 8:00 AM

Uploading Large Attachments

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
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Wednesday, November 11, 2009 8:00 AM

Work Item Categories

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
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Wednesday, November 11, 2009 2:38 AM

Planning vs Testing

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
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Tuesday, November 10, 2009 8:00 AM

Lend a Helping Hand

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
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Monday, November 09, 2009 8:00 AM

Single Instance Application

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
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Friday, November 06, 2009 8:00 AM

Open Items and Manage Queries

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
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Thursday, November 05, 2009 8:00 AM

Manage Queries – Artifact or Manager?

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.
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Wednesday, November 04, 2009 9:16 PM

Screenshots!

I’ve been silly lately. I’ve failed to include screenshots with my blog posts. I didn’t realize how easy it would be with Windows Live Writer . I’ve been using the app, but didn’t realize it would handle posting the images somewhere for me. So, expect
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Wednesday, November 04, 2009 8:00 AM

Using Shared Steps

In MTLM, test cases can reference a reusable, sharable set of test steps . This cuts down on the amount of work it takes to author new test cases, because many test cases contain some of the same steps. The ideal use for this is in common tasks. The quintessential
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Wednesday, November 04, 2009 3:39 AM

New features in Beta2 (compared to Beta1)

We recently announced Beta2 of VS2010. If you have installed the Beta1 release and played with it or even if you didn’t and are experiencing the product for the first time, you are perhaps wondering what is new in Beta2. The table below is an enumeration
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Tuesday, November 03, 2009 8:00 AM

Test Case Authoring from the Test Plan Contents

A test case is just a work item. You can create a new one from Team Explorer in Visual Studio. You can open Excel and connect to the server from the Team add-in, and create one from there. In MTLM, you can also go to Test Case Manager and create test
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Monday, November 02, 2009 8:00 AM

‘Active’ Tests

In the Run Tests activity, you’ll see test cases grouped up by various states including Active, Failed, Blocked, and Completed. This idea comes from the workflow many customers report to using where they run many tests only once per iteration. So the
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