Testing the Application

You can now be more productive throughout your testing lifecycle of planning, testing and tracking your progress by using Visual Studio Ultimate or Visual Studio Test Professional. These testing tools are integrated with Team Foundation Server, which lets you define your testing based on the same team projects that other areas of your organization are using.

Both Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 now include a new application called Microsoft Test Manager to help you define and manage your testing effort by using test plans. You create a test plan and add any test suites, test cases, or configurations that you need, as shown in the following illustration. The configurations are used to determine which set ups you want to use to run test suites or test cases:

Components of a Test Plan

When you have defined all these, you are ready for testing. When requirements or user stories, or features are ready to be tested, you can run your tests for each configuration that you specified. This plan enables you to measure your progress as you run your tests and report on how much testing remains.

You can run manual tests from Microsoft Test Manager using the Microsoft Test Runner. You can also run automated tests from Microsoft Test Manager if the automation is associated with a test case. Results from running these tests will be associated with a test plan.

In addition, you can run automated tests from Visual Studio that are not associated with a plan. You can select to run the tests individually, as part of a check-in policy, or based on test categories. They can also be run as part of a build created by using Team Foundation Build, and from the command line.

Because the testing tools are integrated with the other parts of Visual Studio Ultimate, you can save your test results to a database, generate trend and historical reports, and compare different kinds of data. For example, you might use the data to see how many and which bugs were found by your tests.

Tasks

Use the following topics to help you with testing your application:

Tasks

Associated Topics

Planning your testing effort: You may decide to plan your testing based on either requirements or user stories. You can link your tests to these requirements or user stories and then plan which are the configurations that you want to use to run these tests. Alternatively, you can create test suites based on other criteria to use to plan your testing effort.

Defining Your Testing Effort Using Test Plans

Creating and managing tests: You can create and manage both manual and automated tests as part of your plan. You can create test cases to be run as manual tests with individual test steps from Microsoft Test Manager. Automated tests, such as unit tests, load tests and automated UI tests, can be created by using Visual Studio. Later, if you want, you can convert test cases to automated tests by linking automation to the test case. 

Creating and Managing Tests

Setting up how to run tests or collect data remotely: You can use test settings and environments to set up what types of data to collect remotely, or how to impact the system, when you run your tests. For example, you may want to collect code coverage data, emulate a specific network connection, record your UI actions for a manual test, or collect diagnostic trace logs to help reproduce a complex bug.

Setting Up Test Machines to Run Tests or Collect Data

Running Your Tests: You can run your tests from a test plan using Microsoft Test Manager and save these test results to use to measure your testing progress. You can run your tests using Visual Studio, or you can run your tests from the command line.

Running Tests

Submitting bugs: You can submit bugs with the detailed information that you collect when you run your tests using Test Runner. You can also submit bugs from Visual Studio or Microsoft Test Manager.

Submitting Bugs

Tracking software quality: You can measure your testing readiness, track your testing progress and the status of bugs.

Tracking Software Quality

External Resources

Videos

link to videoVisual Studio Developer Center: How Do I Manage Test Cases with Visual Studio 2010

Hands on labs

MSDN Virtual LabMSDN Virtual Lab: Introduction to Test Case Management in Visual Studio 2010 with Microsoft Test and Lab Manager

MSDN Virtual LabMSDN Virtual Lab: Introduction to Test Planning with Microsoft Test Manager 2010

MSDN Virtual LabMSDN Virtual Lab: Authoring and Running Manual Tests in Visual Studio 2010 using Microsoft Test and Lab Manager

MSDN Virtual LabMSDN Virtual Lab: Introduction to Creating Coded UI Tests with Visual Studio 2010

MSDN Virtual LabMSDN Virtual Lab: Introduction to Quality Tracking with Visual Studio 2010

MSDN Virtual LabMSDN Virtual Lab: Introduction to Exploratory Testing with Microsoft Test Manager 2010

MSDN Virtual LabMSDN Virtual Lab: Introduction to Platform Testing with Microsoft Test Manager 2010

Forums

Testing with Visual Studio Test Manager (MTM)

Visual Studio UI Automation Testing (includes CodedUI)

Visual Studio Web Performance and Load Testing

See Also

Tasks

Quick Start Guide for Manual Testing using Microsoft Test Manager

Concepts

Managing New Testing Efforts