Visual Studio Test Professional 2010: Organization of Artifacts – Part 2
Posted by: Subodh Sohoni ,
on 3/10/2010,
in
Category Visual Studio
Abstract: In the earlier articles, we studied some of the artifacts that are required for planning the testing for a project. In this article we will study the remaining artifact types.
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010: Organization of Artifacts – Part 2
In the earlier articles (Visual Studio Test Professional (VSTS) 2010: Organization of artifacts) we studied some of the artifacts that are required for planning the testing for a project. In this article we will study the remaining artifact types. We have taken an overview of test case as a workitem and have also begun our study of Test Plan as container for artifacts. Test Settings is an important artifact that we studied. We now will view details of Test Configuration, Build Assignment, Shared Steps and Links
Test Configuration: Test Plan is a container for various tests to be carried out under certain conditions and to collect set of data while test is running. It provides a direction to testers to do testing with certain constraints. One of the constraints is Test Configuration.
Test configuration provides the conditions of various machines, their operating systems and other software that needs to be setup and used for the application that is under test to run.
For example if we have created a web application then we want that it should be able to run
- On different combinations of operating systems like Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7
- With versions of Internet Explorer like 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0
- With FireFox 3.0 and 4.0
- On 32 bit and 64 bit processors of Intel and AMD.
All the three (OS, Browser and Processor) of these are configuration variables.
Combination of these variables defines a configuration under which the application is to be tested. For a test plan multiple such combinations aka. Test Configurations are defined. At any time, one or more Test Configurations is used as a default.
Tester selects a Test Plan and automatically default configuration is chosen. If multiple configurations are chosen as default all of them will get selected.
In this version of Microsoft Test Manager, tester is not forced to use the physical configuration on the machines in the environment which match the Test Configuration that is assigned to the Test Plan. In the subsequent versions this compulsion may get built in.
Build Assignment: Team consisting of developers and testers is supposed to use same assemblies for development, testing and bug fixing. To build this consistency in the test plan, MTM provides assignment of Build Number to the Test Plan.
Test Planner may chose either the latest build or any other previous build to be assigned initially to test plan. Once the build is assigned to the test plan, it becomes the ‘Build in use’. It can be changed for higher builds only, when they are available.
Like Test Configuration, there is no compulsion on the tester to use the same build that is assigned to the test plan.
Shared Steps: In the last article (Visual Studio Test Professional (VSTS) 2010: Organization of artifacts), we had studied how to create test cases (workitems). A test case contains number of steps. These steps contain actions to be performed by the tester and expected result against each action. Some of the steps may be common. For example, a user is forced to login for any other feature to be accessed and the steps that user takes for login, are common for all the test cases that test the number of such features. These common steps can be stored as a Shared Steps workitem type.
It becomes reusable component since it can be embedded in number of test cases. This can give a productivity improvement to test case designers.
Links to Test Plan: A test plan may contain any number of links to external URLs. This can provide references to some documents or images as is necessary for providing a complete context to the test plan.
In this article we have completed an overview of various artifacts that are necessary to do the Test Planning. Test plan becomes a set of named properties that uniquely define the context of testing. It also contains the collection of test cases that satisfy certain logic. Those collections are called Test Suites and in the next article we will inspect the concept of test suite in detail.
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Subodh Sohoni is a VSTS MVP, MCTS - Microsoft Team Foundation Server - Configuration and Development and also is a Microsoft Certified Trainer(MCT) since 2004.
This article has been editorially reviewed by Suprotim Agarwal.
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Subodh is a Trainer and consultant on Azure DevOps and Scrum. He has an experience of over 33 years in team management, training, consulting, sales, production, software development and deployment. He is an engineer from Pune University and has done his post-graduation from IIT, Madras. He is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) - Developer Technologies (Azure DevOps), Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT), Microsoft Certified Azure DevOps Engineer Expert, Professional Scrum Developer and Professional Scrum Master (II). He has conducted more than 300 corporate trainings on Microsoft technologies in India, USA, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, UAE, Philippines and Sri Lanka. He has also completed over 50 consulting assignments - some of which included entire Azure DevOps implementation for the organizations.
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