The Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 suite contains several features to support the needs of developers, testers, architects, and managers to simplify the development process. Visual Studio 2012 provides different editions of the product such as Professional, Premium, and Ultimate with different set of tools and features. Visual Studio 2012 is tightly integrated with Team Foundation Server, a central repository and configuration management system that provides version control, process guidance and templates, automated builds, automated tests, bug tracking, work item tracking, reporting, and support of the Lab Center and Test Center configurations. The Microsoft Test Manager 2012 is a standalone tool used to organize Test Plans, Manage test cases, and executing manual test cases.
Software Testing using Visual Studio 2012 helps software developers to get familiarized with the Visual Studio tools and techniques to create automated unit tests, and to use automated user interface testing, code analysis and profiling to find out more about the performance and quality of the code. Testers benefit from learning more about the usage of Testing tools, test case management techniques, working with Test Results, and using Test Center and Lab center. This book also covers different types of testing such as web performance test, load test, executing the manual test cases, recording user actions, re-running tests using recording, test case execution, capturing defects, and linking defects with requirements. Testers also get a high level overview on using Lab Center for creating virtual environments for testing multiple users and multiple location scenarios.
Visual Studio 2012 provides user interface tools such as Test Explorer, Test Results, and Test Configuration to create, execute, and maintain the tests and Test Results in integration with Team Foundation Server. This book provides detailed information on all of the tools used for testing the application during the development and testing phases of the project life cycle.
Chapter 1, Visual Studio 2012 Test Types, provides an overview of different types of testing which helps testing the software applications through different phases of software development. This chapter also introduces the tools and techniques in Visual Studio 2012 for different testing types, Microsoft Test Manager 2012, and its features.
Chapter 2, Test Plan, Test Suite, and Manual Testing, explains the steps involved in creating and managing the Test Plan, Test cases and Test Suite using Test Center in Test Manager. This chapter also explains how to create manual tests by recording the user actions and running the test with data inputs. Sharing the test recording across multiple tests is also covered in this chapter.
Chapter 3, Automated Tests, provides a step-by-step approach to creating Coded UI test from user action recordings. It also explains the steps to execute the coded UI test through data source and adding validation and custom rules to the test.
Chapter 4, Unit Testing, explains the detailed steps involved in creating unit test classes and methods for the code. Different type of assert methods and parameters for testing the code, passing set of data from a data source and testing the code also explained in detail. The mocking framework used for isolating the code and testing it with the help of Shims and Stubs is also explained in detail.
Chapter 5, Web Performance Test, explains the basic way of web testing by recording the user actions and creating a test out of it. Running the test using a data source, adding parameters to the web tests, adding validation and extraction rules, adding looping and branching mechanism to the recorded tests, and here configuring the settings required for the Test Runs are some of the features explained as part of this chapter.
Chapter 6, Advanced Web Testing, explains the way of generating code out of the recorded web tests explained in Chapter 5, Web Performance Test using the Generate Code option. This is very much useful for customizing the test through the code, adding additional logic to the test, adding custom validation and extraction rules.
Chapter 7, Load Testing, helps in simulating various numbers of users, network bandwidths, combination of different web browsers, and different configurations. In the case of web applications it is always necessary to test the stability and performance of the application under huge data load and concurrent users. This chapter explains the steps involved in simulating the real world scenario by using Controllers and Agents. The details of analyzing and exporting the load Test Results are also explained in this chapter.
Chapter 8, Ordered and Generic Tests, explains the way of testing the existing third party tool or service which can also be run using the command line. Visual Studio 2012 provides a feature called ordered test to group all or some of these tests and then execute the tests in the same order. The main advantage of creating the ordered test is to execute multiple tests in an order based on the dependencies. Generic tests are just like any other tests except that it is used for testing an existing third party tool or service.
Chapter 9, Managing and Configuring Tests, explains the details of the test settings file and the tools used for managing tests. The configuration includes deployment details, setup and cleaning scripts, collecting data diagnostics information, unit test and web test settings.
Chapter 10, The Command Line, explains the command line tools such as VSTest. Console, MSTest, and TCM used for running the test with different options, then collecting the output and publishing the results. Each of these commands is used for specific purposes including backwards compatibility.
Chapter 11, Working with Test Results, explains the process of running the tests and publishing the Test Results to the Team Project. Also covered in detail is to integrate the tests as part of Team Foundation Server builds, Build reports and Test Results, Creating work items from Test Results, and publishing the Test Results.
Chapter 12, Exploratory Testing and Reporting, explains the details of testing which happens without any test cases and scripts and by only exploring the application manually. This chapter also explains the details of accessing the Test Results and publishing Test Results and reporting the same in a specific format. Accessing different types of testing reports and creating new test reports are also explained in this chapter.
Chapter 13, Test and Lab Center, is useful for creating and organizing Test Plans and test cases. Test plans can be associated to the requirements using Test Center. The Lab Center helps in creating and configuring different virtual/physical environments for the Test Runs, Test Settings such as defining the roles and configuring the data and diagnostics information for the selected roles, configuring the Test Controllers required for the test, and configuring the test library to store the environment information.