Visual Studio 2005 Team System testing features ...

My goal is to spend some time trying out all of Visual Studio 2005 Team Systems new testing feature:

• Test Project creation
• Record a Web Test: records browser activity and contains a list of Web requests and various properties for each request
• Load Test:  is a test that is designed to put a server application under heavy user load to pinpoint performance and/or scalability problems. In Visual Studio, a load test can be based on a Unit Test or a Web Test.
• Web Test : is a test that is used to verify functionality of a Web application
• Unit Test: tests written to prove that production code will work or works, they map very closely to development code in name and scope (one Unit test, one method).
• Test Format Manual Test
• Word Format Manual Test

I will break down each feature into seperate blogs should anyone like to get all my notes I'll post them as articles (they include snagits of the screens) they are very detailed step by step notes.

Now getting back to the creation of a test project if you've worked with .Net development it is no different you can select either a Test Project or an Empty Test Project you can select the language you want your test scripts to be created in (C#, VB, J# and C++) etc... Once created you have a Solution with References and a Project where you can add items to your project, the items being the above test features.

Recording a Web Test

This feature is very cool, it captures all User interactions with the browser and creates a script for each request. Each script has properties like Think Time and others that I'd like to investigate more on and blog about later. Other features is the ability to bind data to a recorded input field, to add validation rules to a script. You can validate that a text exists on a web page by simply entering for instance “My WebPage“ in the validation rule text.

 Once tests are recorded you can playback, modify, the interesting feature in running these scripts is the display of not only the data gathered but also the Web page requested per script. All this information is kept with the script for review at any time after being run.

These Web tests are not being considered for usage as true QA Functional tests but so far I do not see in some instances why they couldn't be, the purpose of these Web Test recordings is to use them for Load testing.

I am just getting into trying out VS 2005 Team System and if you stay tuned I'll be blogging on more of my findings as I go along.  I am hoping to also have a try at Compuware's TestPartner (GUI - functional test tool) integrated into VS 2005 Team System which I'm looking forward and will blog on also.