Love @ First sight, The Visual Studio Team Test 2010

Recently, I attended the Tech-Ed 2009 at Hyderabad (India). In the Application Lifecycle Management track the Visual Studio Team Test team showcased the new features of Visual Studio 2010 Team Test features. Usually, I write my blogs with screenshots and samples but this time I could not resist myself from telling my first hand experience with the cool features of VSTS 2010.

Mr. Amit Chatterjee delivered the first session on the VSTT 2010 features in the Tech-Ed on 13-May-2009. The theme was ‘Visual Studio 2010 has a new BUG’. Yes, the Visual Studio Team test has a new “BUG” i.e. the BUG Workitem. You will say ‘what is so new in that ?’  it is already there in the Visual Studio 2008 but this is really new & exciting …

… now in the Bug WorkItem you can automatically record the test and attach the screenshots & the video to the Bug workitem and it happens automatically once you turn on a couple of switches. Now Visual Studio will have the Lab management capabilities so if you want to test your application on a given platform you can do that. Rather than giving each tester additional set of PCs to test the application, you can put all these PCs in a Pool. These PCs will host the Hyper-V VMs specific to your test environment. The tester can test your applications thoroughly in this environment, preserve the environment, if something goes wrong - they can always step back to the previous setting and finally when everything done – they can tear down this VM to make additional room for other VMs. The coolness in this feature is … the Developers & Testers need not to be an IT-Pro or an Administrator to stage all this environment, the VSTS provides the connectivity to System Center Virtual Machine Manager and from within the VSTS you can initiate this environment and manage it. This will help the customers spend less from their IT budget and enhance the productivity of the testers. If you remember, I said “ENVIRONMENT” i.e. you can even test your distributed applications. These features were demonstrated by Shay Mandel.

One of the other cool feature that I loved the most is the Coded UI test. I work with a lot of ISVs and it has been a constant demand that they need to have some tools to test the UI. Now the VSTS 2010 comes with an ‘INTELLIGENT’ test recorder. ‘I want to emphasize the word INTELLIGENT’ because unlike the usual test tool that records the (X,Y) coordinates and breaks when the screen resolution changes, the VSTS 2010 records the details of the controls used on the web pages and creates the C# or VB.Net code in the background so now you can either play it back and write a few lines of code to test this application’s UI against the million possible values. You can even fetch the data from your database and play it on the UI to check if any of these values break the UI, just by writing simple code.

Check out for more in the near future…