Testing for Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio 2012 RC

Microsoft patterns & practices has release Testing for Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio 2012 RC the guide describes how testing has been changing over the years and how Visual Studio 2012 RC helps us achieve continuous delivery. Just to get your interest here is a statement from the preface.

“Testing has always been the less glamorous sister to software development, scarcely noticed outside the software business, and the butt of complaints inside.”

I had the privilege of working on this book with the author’s as a contributor and reviewer.

Visual Studio 2012 RC is available.

VS Ultimate RC

Visual Studio 2012 Application Lifecycle Management Virtual Machine and Hands-on-Labs / Demo Scripts

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Agile, Scrum webcasts to join

Agile.org has some create webcasts on subjects concerning Agile, Scrum. You can either sign up to them or go to the archive listing. Couple of interest are:

Agile Practices in a Traditional Organization

Adopting Test-First Development

Release Duration and Enterprise Agility

On May 15th is Agile and Quality: It is not an Oxymoron but a Necessity

Click here to check out the public webcast series.

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Code Coverage for Manual Testing is coming in vNext …

Microsoft is storyboarding the process of code coverage for manual testing. They are also looking for you to complete a quick survey on the subject. The Visual Studio ALM team are asking for our help so let’s give it to them. Click below to do the survey.

Code Coverage for Manual Testing Survey

This is how tools get made that we will use, thanks for helping.

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Microsoft TFS, Test Manager & Visual Studio–Why use it?

At Tech Days in Montreal a gentleman and I were chatting about Test Manager. He made a statement that I thought was well worth sharing.

It goes something like this:

“With Test Manager we no longer have to try and figure out when a tester leaves the company what all the excel spreadsheets on their desktop are all about. We know where the test cases are and what they test. It is great.”

I for one have been an advocate of reducing the paperwork tester’s have been required to generate. I know there were times we spent more time documenting what we were going to do then actually doing it. Including testing!

The comment was well stated and I agree Microsoft has created a great tool.

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Test Case customization by Dave Lloyd

The test case work item has a tab that lists the requirements/user stories that the test case tests. However, bugs related to the test case are not part of the listing. Dave has come up with a customization that changes the test case tab to include bugs created against the test case. With this customization you will see all work items that the test case tests.

Read Dave’s blog for more details and how to do the customization.

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Exploratory Testing Blog by Anutthara

Anutthara is the Program Manager in the Visual Studio ALM Test Tools group at Microsoft. She is doing a series blog on Exploratory Testing. Anu's team does exploratory testing on all their projects and is well versed on the topic. Follow Anu's Exploratory Testing series by clicking here.

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Agile with Microsoft Visual Studio

Sam Guckenheimer is the Product Owner of Microsoft Visual Studio product line. He has 30 years' experience as architect, developer, tester, product manager, project manager and general manager in the software industry worldwide.

Sam’s new book “Agile Software Engineering with Visual Studio: From Concept to Continuous Feedback” is a must for all to read. Available in paperback and kindle from Amazon.

Sam recently did a webcast for TesTrek 2011 in Toronto which is also well worth watching. Sam talks about Getting Agile with Testing.

“Testing is central to the success or failure of any organization adopting the Agile Consensus. A modern testing approach can be a great enabler of value flow, transparency and the reduction of waste. An outmoded testing approach can be a huge impediment and source of unending conflict. As testers, it's important that we be on the right side of the consensus and be the enablers. The alternative is untenable. In this session, we will explore fundamental principles of agile project delivery and discuss the impact on the QA lifecycle. “

If your in Toronto the week of November 7th sign up for TesTrek 2011 Conference where Sam is the keynote speaker. Dave Lloyd and I will be doing a hands on workshop on Exploratory Testing. There is lots happening this year at TesTrek check it out.

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Microsoft vNext preview has been released as of yesterday

Microsoft vNext was released yesterday at BUILD and is available on MSDN if you have a subscription. The released name is Visual Studio 11. There is lots of new stuff for the developer’s but of interest to me and likely anyone following my blog is the Agile features shown in the diagram below. The Exploratory Testing tool is very cool as is the Feedback tool. What am I saying it is all cool.

Check out more information on each of these items here.

Visual Studio 11

image

Stay tuned I will do my own review of these tools for you in the days to come.

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TesTrek 2011 in Toronto – Nov. 7th to 10th

Sign up for an Object Sharp workshop on Exploratory Testing at TesTrek 2011 in Toronto, Ontario on November 11th at 1:30pm. Myself and Dave Lloyd will be presenting plus giving you hands on experience doing exploratory testing. See how to overcome the challenges of tracking the steps you took, reporting bugs and retesting exploratory bugs.

Experience and Overcome the Challenges of Exploratory Testing

In 1983, the term Exploratory Testing was introduced. Prior to that, we called it ad-hoc testing. Exploratory testing is said to be a mindset, a way of thinking, freestyle testing that liberates the tester to explore. Testers, through experience, know their applications inside out; they are the users in reality. Freeing testers to explore and use the application has been proven to identify more bugs then traditional scripted testing. However, there are obstacles and challenges related to this freestyle testing. Join this workshop to explore those obstacles hands on and learn how we can overcome them. Explore an application with known bugs and see if you can find them.

  • Experience exploratory testing using the Microsoft Test Manager Tool.
  • Do your own exploratory testing on a Virtual Machine in the cloud.
  • Discover the difficulties of exploratory testing, how to track the steps, report the bug, and perform retesting.
  • Participate in idea generation for overcoming the issues of exploratory testing.

Sign up for the first TesTrek hands-on workshop.

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