The first time we looked at the Visual Studio Team System 2008, we realized that there were lot of features that used to be different individual products on their own, that were very well integrated, and readily available under a single IDE. Some of these were available with earlier versions of Visual Studio, but this version is tightly integrated with the Team Foundation Server.
Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 suite contains several tools that satisfy the needs of developers, testers, managers, and architects. Not only are the tools available, but they are also well integrated to collect information at every stage of the project life cycle and to maintain this information under one roof. The Visual Studio Team System 2008 is supported by Team Foundation Server, which is the central repository system that provides version control, process guidance and templates, automated build, manual and automated testing, bug tracking, work item tracking, and reporting.
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite provides all of the integrated tools for different team members. There are different editions for specific team members, including Architecture Edition, Test Edition, Database Edition, and Development Edition. This book covers the tools for the test and development phase of a project and for reporting the project status.
This book will help developers to get to know how to use the tools for automated unit testing, code analysis, and profiling to test their own code and to find out the performance and quality of their code. Testers will learn more about creating the web test, load test, and manual test, to determine the quality of the product, and also to raise defects and assign them to the developers for fixing.
VSTS provides different tools, such as the Test List Editor, Test View, and Test Configuration user interfaces, to easily manage the multiple tests created during the project life cycle. This book covers in-depth details of creating and maintaining different test types using VSTS.
Chapter 1, Software Testing and Visual Studio Team System 2008—This chapter gives an overall introduction to software testing and the types of testing involved in the software development life cycle (SDLC). It also provides an introduction to the different tools available in Visual Studio Team System 2008 to support different testing types for the SDLC.
Chapter 2, Unit Testing—This chapter explains the testing tool used by developers to make sure that the code produces the expected result. Creating unit tests, generating code and different assert statements, and the types used for testing are explained in detail in this chapter. Various attributes used for differentiating classes from test classes and methods from test methods, along with the initializing and cleaning methods are also explained in detail in this chapter.
Chapter 3, Web Testing—This chapter walks us through the tool used for testing web applications developed using .NET. This tool is used for recording a test scenario and then testing it with sample data from different data sources. Applying validation and extraction rules, adding data sources, and adding transactions are explained in detail using a sample application in Visual Studio Team System 2008. Some of the features, such as adding Plug-ins, parameterizing the web server, and running and debugging the web tests, are covered in this chapter.
Chapter 4, Advanced Web Testing—Generating coded web tests from recorded web tests and creating coded web tests using the Visual Studio Team System 2008 tool are explained in detail and with examples. Some of the other advanced topics covered in this chapter include adding dynamic parameters, adding rules to the coded web test, creating custom rules, and running the coded web test.
Chapter 5, Load Testing—This chapter explains how to use unit testing or web testing, and how to simulate a realistic scenario such as the number of concurrent users that have different browsers and different network speed, and are accessing the system from multiple locations. This testing collects the application performance and stability data in different scenarios, and is used for analyzing this data in order to scale the application for better performance.
Chapter 6, Manual, Generic, and Ordered Test—This chapter explains different tools that support testing an application manually, without using an automated testing tool. In the case of multiple interdependent tests, we can easily define the tests to be run in a specific order so that the dependent tests don't fail. Visual studio supports all these including Generic and Smoke tests which are explained here.
Chapter 7, Managing and Configuring Tests—Even though we have a lot of testing types and tools, managing these tests is sometimes a very difficult task. This chapter explains the easy way to organize the tests into lists, to enable and disable tests, configure the tests and test runs, view the tests using the Test View window and the test list editor, and run the tests in Visual Studio Team System 2008.
Chapter 8, Deploying and Running the tests—Once we are ready with the required type of test for the application, we have to deploy it on the test machines, run the test application, and collect the results for analysis. There are multiple ways of deploying the application and running the application using some of the advanced features provided by Visual Studio Team system 2008, and these are explained in detail in this chapter.
Chapter 9, Command Line—There are different ways of running a test based on the environment and requirements. In some situations, we may need a test to be run from the command line without using the user interface. The test works in the same way, but it runs without any user interaction. This chapter explains the different command line options and parameters used for running a test using command line commands.
Chapter 10, Working with Test Results—The main objective of running the tests is to collect the results and analyze them to correct any application errors, to make sure that the test is producing the expected result, and to increase the performance and stability of the application. This chapter explains in detail how to look at the test results and code coverage, and publish the test results.
Chapter 11, Reporting—Reporting is one of the main areas of software development in which the software quality is reported and monitored. Visual Studio Team System 2008 provides lot of reporting templates and features that can be used to upload the test results and publish them to the management and the team, in order to monitor the project's quality and performance. This chapter explains the detailed steps involved in publishing the results and creating and customizing the report using the available reporting templates in Visual Studio Team System 2008 and Team Foundation Server.
This book requires a basic knowledge of Visual Studio Team System 2008 and of integrating this with Team Foundation Server. The reader must be familiar with the Visual Studio IDE. Most testers might have used different testing tools, but they should be little bit familiar with coding in Visual Studio if they are intent on using the coded web test and their own unit testing. The following tools are required by testers and developers in order to make the most of all of the chapters of this book.
1. Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite, Test Edition, or Developer edition
2. SQL Server Express
3. Team Foundation Server 2005 or later
4. Microsoft Office (Word is required for Manual testing)
5. SQL Server Analysis and Reporting Server (for customizing reports and publishing them)
This book is for Microsoft developers and testers who are working with Visual Studio 2008, and who need to create a structured testing environment for their applications. No prior knowledge of testing is required. The reader will need to be familiar with the standard Visual Studio 2008 environment, but anyone who has previously created and compiled code in this environment will easily follow this book.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code will be set as follows:
<Deployment> <DeploymentItem filename="Test.dll" /> <DeploymentItem filename="ClassLibrary1.dll" /> <DeploymentItem filename="CustomeRules.dll" /> </Deployment>
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be shown in bold:
pdbFile="C:\Workspace\WebTestPluginSample\ bin\Debug\WebTestPluginSample.pdb" instrumentInPlace="true" />
<CodeCoverageItem binaryFile="C:\Workspace\ WebTestPluginSample\bin\Debug\ WebTestPluginSampleTwo.dll"
pdbFile="C:\Workspace\WebTestPluginSample\ bin\Debug\WebTestPluginSampleTwo.pdb" instrumentInPlace="true" />
</Regular>
Any command-line input and output is shown as follows:
mstest /testmetadata:[file name] /testlist:[test list name]
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Select the test project, right click, and choose Add. Then select the option Web test from the context menu."
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