Defining Test Lists to Group Your Tests

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 lets you use test categories or test lists to group your tests together. The Test List Editor and the Test View window display the tests in your solution. Although the Test View window displays a flat list, you can use the Test List Editor to organize tests into a hierarchical structure of test lists. Test lists function both as nodes and as containers; they can contain tests and other test lists.

Note

Test categories are recommended for use over the test lists functionality from earlier versions of Visual Studio, unless you have to create a check-in policy which requires a test list. For more information about test categories, see Defining Test Categories to Group Your Tests.

When your project uses dozens or hundreds of tests, it helps to have the capability of visualizing them in groups, or lists. But this is not the only reason to organize them into lists. You can also run the tests in a list by first selecting the list in the Visual Studio IDE, or you can run the tests in a list using the command-line test utility.

Tasks

Tasks

Associated Topics

Creating and managing test lists: You can create and manage test lists and use them to manage your automated tests.

Running tests using test lists: You can use test lists to run your automated tests from Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 or from the command line with mstest.exe.

Running tests as part of the build process: When a build is complete, you can automatically run the tests in a test list to verify that this new build is stable.

Using tests to determine the quality of the code that is being checked in: You can use test lists to enforce that these automated tests have been run and pass before a developer checks in code to your Team Foundation Server.

See Also

Tasks

How to: Run Automated Tests from Microsoft Visual Studio

Concepts

Defining Test Categories to Group Your Tests

Other Resources

Creating Automated Tests