Microsoft seeing work item history made easier

Dave Lloyd has updated GetHistory a power tool for displaying work item history. Now you can export the work item history to excel. If your company has a audit process that has to be followed this tool may help you report on changes to requirements, test cases, bugs in just a few steps.

Click Get History to get the newest version. Keep your eye out on this tool you never know what features Dave may add!

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Agile vs. Traditional Approach to Unit Testing

Harry Baran from Thoughtworks posted a blog that I think is very much worth sharing. Harry outlines in his posting some of the difference between unit testing in Agile to the Traditional approach.

Unit testing in any process needs to be getting the attention it deserves, if done right it can be an early quality indicator for the solution under development. Test teams need to get involved in unit testing to some capacity no matter what process/methodology being followed. Pair up your developers and testers, offer training to your testers in unit testing and coding, hire testers with coding skills, let your testers see and understand what is being unit tested.

To quote Harry Baran: “Unit tests are foundations of an agile project. They enable fast feedback, continuous testing, continuous integration and refactoring.”

As children we were taught to share, for some reason one of the most important aspects of developing an application has not been shared. Time to change that, isn’t it? 

Unit Testing: Agile vs. Traditional Approach

Great write up Hari, thanks,

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Looking for tester who can create Unit Tests – What?

In the blog Functional/System testing with Visual Studio/Test Manager we talked about unit testing. Testers in the near future are going to need unit testing skills. Now that is a very scary statement given 70% of testing is done manually. Now is the time to start learning by taking programming courses, unit testing courses, pairing with developers to learn and searching the web.

In the Visual Studio magazine Jeff Levinson article Take Unit Testing to the Next Level talks about how to add unit tests to requirements to show test coverage. Jeff supplies code you can download and instructions on creating simple unit tests then how to link them to requirements. If you have Visual Studio give it a try.

Thanks Jeff

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SharePoint 2010 Performance Testing Tips and Tricks

On Wednesday, January 25th I will be doing a session on Performance Testing SharePoint 2010.  This free session is online with a 20 minute presentation and demo and then Q & A starting at 12:25pm. Join us if you are available and can attend. Contact Denise Faustino for information on how to log into the session.

Denise's contact info.

Email dfaustino@objectsharp.com

Toll Free: 1-877-So-Sharp

Local: 416-649-3690

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Microsoft Test Manager–action recording bulk edit

A MSDN Blogger, Gautam Goenka is giving away the code to enable you to do bulk action recording edits. Click here

Thanks Gautam

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Microsoft Blogs – Canadian Solution Developer

If you are reading this blog you should check out bloggers, Susan Ibach and Jonathan Rozenblit. Microsoft developer evangelist who are the resident bloggers at Canadian Solution Developer. Susan and Jonathan are posting some very informative information on ALM, TFS, Visual Studio, testing, events coming, events happening now and in the past.

The most recent blog is about LinkedIn with some great tips on setting up a professional profile. What not to do and what is important to do. Click the link below to see what they have to say.

Microsoft Canadian Solution Developer blog

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Microsoft TFS and QTP integration

If you do not have a profile on LinkedIn it is time to join. There are amazing groups that are sharing information, posting questions & getting answers for a lot of different topics.

On the Visual Studio ALM User Group Anna shared a blog she posted  “How to integration TFS and QTP

Other LinkedIn groups related to TFS are:

  • Visual Studi0 2010 Testing
  • Microsoft Visual Studio ALM + Team Foundation Server (Team System)
  • Microsoft TFS/VST Customization Experts
  • Microsoft Testing Visual Studio 2010
  • Microsoft Coded UI

There are also Agile groups:

  • Agile Testing
  • Agile Toronto

This in no way is a compete list.

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Ladies learning code ….

It is amazing what a twit can do. Back in June 2011 Heather Payne twitted about a group of ladies in California that get together to learn how to code. The response was unbelievable. The first meeting to just talk about the idea rallied 85 people. The first session in Sept was sold out. The Ladies are learning how to code from scratch, no experience necessary by volunteers will to spend time training.

Did you know there is a 12% to 88% mix of women to men in the IT industry?

Ladies Learning Code website

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The 10 Minute Test Plan by Jim Whittaker

Jim Whittaker recently wrote an article called The 10 Minute Test Plan. It is a must to read. If you’ve been in testing where you had to write a Test Plan you will be grinning as you read and nodding you head.

To get your interest here is the first 2 paragraphs of Jim’s article:

Anything in software development that takes ten minutes or less to perform is either trivial or is not worth doing in the first place. If you take this rule of thumb at face value, where do you place test planning? Certainly it takes more than 10 minutes. In my capacity as Test Director at Google I presided over teams that wrote a large number of test plans and every time I asked how long one would take I was told “tomorrow” or “the end of the week” and a few times, early in the day, I was promised one “by the end of the day.” So I’ll establish the task of test planning to be of the hours-to-days duration.

As to whether it is worth doing, well, that is another story entirely. Every time I look at any of the dozens of test plans my teams have written, I see dead test plans. Plans written, reviewed, referred to a few times and then cast aside as the project moves in directions not documented in the plan. This begs the question: if a plan isn’t worth bothering to update, is it worth creating in the first place?'

The Ten Minute Test Plan

The nice thing about using Microsoft Test Manager is my test plan is built in and I can update it as things change. I can use Test Scribe to output it to a word document is anyone does want to really read it.

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Microsoft - Search Work Items for TFS 2010

Check out the add-in tool that allows you to do searches for work items and it can be downloaded free. If your still using VS2008 or VS2005 there is a version of this tool available for them too.

Search Work Items for TFS2010 

Examples of work item searches with this tool:

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Blog on how to use click here.

Enjoy Testa Smile