Testing with Team System
At Notion, we get a lot of random questions to some of our generic email accounts. Just recently, I've become the person these get routed to. I don't answer them all, it's not our job to be free tech support for the world ;-), but I answer some, specifically the ones that sound like they might be legitimate business opportunities. Anyway - I decided to start posting the questions and answers to my blog, so they might benefit more people. Here's the first - names stripped to protect identity:
Our products are complex and varied – using primarily the Windows platform (We are MS Developers utilizing MS Visual Studio, Server 2003, MS SQL 2005 and XP Pro primarily but not exclusively).
We use .NET & C# with Web and Windows applications over about a dozen apps with several plug ins etc…. (a “suite” if you will)
I’ve been looking at a product we can upgrade to.(we have a previous license with TestComplete) and we also are being pushed by the developers to stick solely with MS products such as Visual Studio/Team which they use – and we (QA) use just the ‘Bug Tracking’ part of it – not being code oriented developers ourselves – but needing to communicate with them on bugs etc..
Our code moves a bit fast – and we’re under the impression that very little automation is going to help us all that much – but we need to confirm this. As well as seeing if any coding or testing directly in MS Visual Studio/Team will give us the benefits of (I believe) what I think we need – which is ‘object oriented’ testing capabilities.
Can you give us your insight on all these matters – and perhaps tell us what your impressions and recommendations would be?
My answer:
What I normally recommend is using Team System to track your defects and manage your testing (test plans, test runs, etc.). This gives you a central repository for your tests and test results that you can use for reporting. Team System lacks a good functional UI tester (GUI automation) – for this, I would continue using TestComplete which integrates nicely with Team System. You can use Team System’s web testing capabilities to test your web applications, though some of the test mechanics can get very “code oriented”. A generally good strategy is having the QA team record the web tests, and have the development team maintain and run them as they modify the code.
You can get some more information from the following videos:
http://vstsrocks.com/files/25/vste-test_new/default.aspx
as well as the complete VSTS Overview (you can just download and fast forward to the testing part) located here:
http://vstsrocks.com/files/10/vsts/default.aspx