MSDN Magazine Launch Issue - February 15, 2008 - (Page 27) Custom Test Automation with Team System DR. JAMES MCCAFFREY here is no single best way to test software. In addition to manual testing, depending on your particular development environment, you may be using commercial test automation frameworks, open source and in-house test automation frameworks, and custom test automation scripts. All these approaches have pros and cons. Custom test automation scripts have the advantages of being quick to write and providing maximum flexibility. However, a downside to using custom test automation is manageability. Your testing effort can become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of test scripts, test case data, and test results. Luckily, Visual Studio® 2005 Team System provides you with the ability to manage custom test automation. Let me show you what I mean using a couple of screen shots. First, consider the test automation script shown executing in Figure 1. The test automation is a very short JavaScript script that is performing module testing on a method named TriMax that simply returns the largest of three integers. The TriMax method is housed inside a classic COM DLL file. Although simple and effective, test automation using this type of approach has several weaknesses. Where are the test results being stored? Against which build of the DLL is this test run being executed? How can these test results be shared with other members of the development team? Are these results related to any open bugs? Visual Studio Team System is designed to handle such issues, as Figure 2 shows. Visual Studio 2005 Team System consists of Team Foundation Server (TFS) plus one of the client-side editions of Visual Studio. You can think of TFS as an intelligent back-end data warehouse that stores and manages all the data associated with a software development project, including source code, bugs, test results, specification documents, and much more. The custom test automation functionality I describe in this column is provided in Visual Studio Team Edition for Testers. You can download the 180-day evaluation version of Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite, which includes the functionality of all editions, plus Team Foundation Server from microsoft.com/downloads. T Figure 1 Typical Custom Test Automation Script and wrap it into a test that can be managed by the Team System. The second example expands on the first by showing you how to modify custom test automation so you can create test case results that have more detailed information than a simple pass or fail result. My third example shows how to use Team Foundation Server to store and manage test run result data. I’ll present three examples in this column. The first shows how to use VSTE for Testers to take a very simple piece of custom test automation Figure 2 Managing Custom Automation with Team System launch2008 27 http://microsoft.com/downloads
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