As part of introducing you to Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers (VSTEST) and Visual Studio Team Edition... more

As part of introducing you to Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers (VSTEST) and Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Developers (VSTESD), we need to see where these tools fit within the life cycle of software development. To give you, the reader, a better understanding of this, we’re going to discuss briefly the general software development process.

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Now that you have an overview from Chapter 1 of Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers (VSTEST) and Visual Studio... more

Now that you have an overview from Chapter 1 of Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers (VSTEST) and Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Developers (VSTESD), let’s look at what has changed in the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE), then dive into each of those areas in Chapters 3 through 9.

This chapter first looks at the test types in VSTEST and VSTESD and moves on to the user interface (UI) directly related to working with those test types. The chapter finishes by looking at additional tools useful for testing that do not fit into a specific test type (that is, static and dynamic analysis tools incorporated into Visual Studio).

After you complete this chapter, you will have a good understanding of what has been included in the editions of Visual Studio for Testers and for Developers and be ready to dive into the specific details of each of the features.

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Often developers ask when they are writing their applications, “Am I doing this right? Did I break anything else?”... more

Often developers ask when they are writing their applications, “Am I doing this right? Did I break anything else?” Unit testing provides a simple, efficient, and flexible way to achieve a greater peace of mind through fast, reproducible, automated tests. However, unit tests can go beyond simple unit tests toward scenario testing—it all depends on the problem you’re trying to solve.

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The goal of this chapter is to develop and test a database project using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for... more

The goal of this chapter is to develop and test a database project using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals (VSTEDP).

Most applications interact with a database that also requires testing. This chapter explains how to test a SQL Server database using VSTEDP.

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One of the types of tests that you can create in VSTEST is a web test. This is a test specifically designed for testing... more

One of the types of tests that you can create in VSTEST is a web test. This is a test specifically designed for testing a Web-based application. This could be a simple web page, a full web site, a set of web services, or (usually) a combination of all of them. Web tests use HTTP requests (POST/GET) to test your Web application.

They are also the easiest tests to create in VSTEST because of the built-in test recorder that allows you to record the HTTP requests that occur as you access and use your site. You then replay those recorded HTTP requests (as is, or with some editing) as a web test.

There are two types of web tests that you can use. The first is the “Basic Web Test,” which will work for most scenarios that you need to test. It is very simple to create and edit using a very easy UI and has a recorder for quick test creation. While these web tests are flexible enough for most testing needs, because the test is made up of a list of HTTP requests with no exposed code, there are some cases in which you need more control. For those cases, VSTEST provides a “Coded Web Test” that is essentially a web test converted into C# or Visual Basic code. This allows you to edit the test scenario in a more complicated fashion and allows more flow control (e.g., conditionals and looping). But, of course, this flexibility comes at the cost of increased complexity and maintenance from using code. Coded web tests are discussed at the end of this chapter.

Web tests are also very closely linked to load testing because one of the major concerns for a web site is whether it can handle thousands of users at a time. For this reason, many of the settings and properties of web tests are only useful in the context of a load test. This chapter focuses on covering web tests and will call out such load test–related issues. But we cover the load testing aspects in much more detail in Chapter 7.

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In Chapters 3 through 5, we looked at authoring and running unit and web tests. Now we move into a different type of test,... more

In Chapters 3 through 5, we looked at authoring and running unit and web tests. Now we move into a different type of test, what we’ll call a container test type. These types of tests have the purpose of holding other tests. For example, as we briefly discussed in Chapter 2, an ordered test contains a list of tests in which you can specify the order of execution. Generic tests wrap a command line, providing you with a way to include legacy tests as part of your Visual Studio testing framework. Manual tests are a special animal: They don’t have code, and they can be a single test or they can have multiple tests as part of the test description—it all depends on how the author writes those tests. Because manual tests are straightforward and are a unique animal, I’ve included their discussion in this chapter, and we’ll begin with a look at manual tests.

The load test type also falls into the category of what we are calling a container test type. It, however, is complex enough to warrant a chapter of its own
(see Chapter 7). We have also provided a sample walk-through of a load test in Appendix D.

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If you have created a set of functional tests—unit tests, web tests, and so forth—running them will tell you... more

If you have created a set of functional tests—unit tests, web tests, and so forth—running them will tell you if your application works. At least you know it works pretty well for a single user. And for many applications this is all you need, if you are planning on having only one user at a time. But if it’s a client/server or a Web-based application or service, then you need to verify that it works under load. Verifying that your application works well when 100 or 1,000 or 1 million users are hitting it at the same time can be very tricky. Even deciding what your definition of “works well” is for these scenarios can be difficult.

VSTEST provides a good set of tools to help you examine your application’s functionality and performance under such stress/load conditions. Allowing you to gather and examine these data under various load scenarios will help you make decisions as to whether or not your application is ready for the huge number of customers you will have and will help identify where you need to make fixes and improvements, or buy more hardware.

Much of this chapter assumes that you have the Visual Studio 2005 Team Test Load Agent (VSTTLA) product in addition to VSTEST. The Visual Studio Team Test Load Agent product provides the features for setting up and managing multi-computer test rigs with a Controller and several Agent computers. A limited level of load testing can be performed without setting up a test rig (essentially your VSTEST computer acts as the manager, controller, and agent), and many of this chapter’s topics still apply in that case.

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In this chapter, we’re going to look at the code analysis tools in VSTESD. These are tools that allow you to verify... more

In this chapter, we’re going to look at the code analysis tools in VSTESD. These are tools that allow you to verify the correctness of an application without executing it. After we’ve looked at these tools and the benefits/drawbacks associated with them, we will take a look at the dynamic analysis tools that allow for performance profiling and analysis of your application. As with code analysis tools, these are only available in VSTESD. We will examine Code Coverage, a component of Dynamic Analysis that is available in VSTEST, as well as in the full Dynamic Analysis toolset that is in VSTESD.

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With the software testing and developer analysis tools added to Visual Studio Team Edition introduced in the earlier chapters,... more

With the software testing and developer analysis tools added to Visual Studio Team Edition introduced in the earlier chapters, we turn to look at when and where these tools can be applied in a software development life cycle (SDLC) and how they intersect with the Team Foundation System.

While we will look at integration points for VSTEST and VSTESD tools, this chapter does not go into great detail about the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (VSTFS). For greater detail on installing, configuring, deploying, and managing VSTFS, please refer to the book Professional Team Foundation Server, published by Wrox and authored by Jean-Luc David, Mickey Gousset, and Erik Gunvaldson.

We’ll begin by looking at what VSTFS has to offer and why your team would consider adding it as a tool. Next, we’ll look at the software development methodologies, move on to collaborating with your team using VSTFS, and finish with how the different development tools plug in to VSTFS.

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Coding an application and writing manual and automated tests to verify its functionality is a small part of a much larger... more

Coding an application and writing manual and automated tests to verify its functionality is a small part of a much larger picture when working in a team environment. The Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (VSTFS) is another piece of the complete Microsoft Visual Studio Team System toolset. If you are on a team that uses VSTFS, there are several opportunities that open up to you in sharing your tests and reporting on their results. Some of these scenarios as they apply to the tester and developer tools addressed in this book are discussed in Chapter 9.

With your team running a Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, you can join the party by installing Team Explorer. This appendix goes through the steps of getting that particular utility added to your installation of Visual Studio.

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We have selected some tests to give you a quick introduction to some of the tools in VSTEST and VSTESD.... more

We have selected some tests to give you a quick introduction to some of the tools in VSTEST and VSTESD. This is meant to help you quickly see some of the UI around this feature to help you decide if you want to explore the topic further. To go into greater depth on the web test type, read Chapter 5.

To begin with, we need a test project. This can be accomplished by either creating a completely new test project, or adding it to an existing solution. Adding it to a solution works particularly well if the solution already contains the source code for the web project you are about to test. In this example, a completely new test project has been created and is the only project in the solution.

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We have selected some tests to give you a quick introduction to the tools in VSTEST and VSTESD. This is meant to help... more

We have selected some tests to give you a quick introduction to the tools in VSTEST and VSTESD. This is meant to help you quickly see some of the UI around this feature to help you decide if you want to explore the topic further. To go into greater depth on the unit test type, read Chapters 3 and 4.

This example begins by opening an existing project called SimpleMath—a library containing methods for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing numbers. Through the course of this example, we will add a test project to the solution, autogenerate tests against the methods in the SimpleMath class, modify the tests, and finally execute the tests to see the results.

While we’ve not provided the source code anywhere for this example, it’s a simple matter of creating a new Windows library and typing in the lines of code found in Figure C-3 should you wish to follow along in a hands-on way.

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We have selected some tests to give you a quick introduction to some of the tools in VSTEST and VSTESD.... more

We have selected some tests to give you a quick introduction to some of the tools in VSTEST and VSTESD. This is meant to help you quickly see some of the UI and workflows around using this feature to help you decide if you want to explore the topic further. To go into greater depth on the load test type, read Chapter 7.

This example takes you through the creation of a test project, refers to adding automated test types as shown in Appendixes B and C, and then puts those test types to use by creating a load test using the Load Test wizard. Lastly, it shows you how to run the load test and examine the results. This will help you understand the flow of this test type, but more detail about this test type is found in Chapter 7.

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We have selected some tests to give you a quick introduction to some of the tools in VSTEST and VSTESD.... more

We have selected some tests to give you a quick introduction to some of the tools in VSTEST and VSTESD. This is meant to help you quickly see some of the UI and workflows around using this feature to help you decide if you want to explore the topic further. To go into greater depth on the manual test type, read Chapter 6.

This example takes you through the creation of a test project, refers to adding a manual test, and then executes that test. This will help you understand the flow of this test type, but more detail about this test type is found in Chapter 6.

The manual test type is available only in the VSTEST installation of Visual Studio. If you’ve installed the full Visual Studio Team Suite, then you have VSTEST.

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Because of how quickly information changes, it’s important to have links to other sources so that not only can you... more

Because of how quickly information changes, it’s important to have links to other sources so that not only can you find more details on the topics addressed in this book, but also look beyond to software development and testing communities that you might not yet know about.

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