TFS and VS 2010 Test Tools - Making the Transition
Posted on 2010-Nov-23 at 11:19
Earlier this year, I recommended to my employer that we transition our testing from HP Quality Center to Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010. I am not generally a Microsoft fan but this move actually made sense for our company on several levels, and our management agreed. This past month we began that migration.
The first step was done by our Development team, who upgraded our Team Foundation Server from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010. A new project was created in our TFS server for our QA team to use. Some of the existing projects had to be modified to make them aware of the new work item types in TFS, such as the Test Case and Shared Steps.
We used an export tool from Juvander to pull our manual test cases out of Quality Center to Excel format. We then used a Microsoft tool to import from Excel to import the test cases into our new TFS project. Our team is now using Microsoft Test Manager for our manual testing, though we are still in the learning stage. One downside is that since we are sharing a server with our Development team, performance can be slow at times.
In order to fully use the new testing features, we will need to set up a Test Controller to define our test environments and test machines. This is also required for automated testing.
Getting our automated testing migrated from Quicktest Pro to Visual Studio 2010 Coded UI tests is going to be a separate manual effort. Apparently the Coded UI test recorder does not record events (or most of them at least) generated by a QTP playback. That would have been a helpful shortcut to get started, but as I expected it looks like we will have to re-record all our automated tests from scratch.
Overall the move will provide some benefits such as being able to link test cases to bug and requirements work items, which we were not able to do before. Using the same programming language as our developers (C# in our case) should provide other benefits down the road. The VBScript language that QTP uses is very limited, especially in its data structures. Using a "real" programming language for automation will be refreshing.
The first step was done by our Development team, who upgraded our Team Foundation Server from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010. A new project was created in our TFS server for our QA team to use. Some of the existing projects had to be modified to make them aware of the new work item types in TFS, such as the Test Case and Shared Steps.
We used an export tool from Juvander to pull our manual test cases out of Quality Center to Excel format. We then used a Microsoft tool to import from Excel to import the test cases into our new TFS project. Our team is now using Microsoft Test Manager for our manual testing, though we are still in the learning stage. One downside is that since we are sharing a server with our Development team, performance can be slow at times.
In order to fully use the new testing features, we will need to set up a Test Controller to define our test environments and test machines. This is also required for automated testing.
Getting our automated testing migrated from Quicktest Pro to Visual Studio 2010 Coded UI tests is going to be a separate manual effort. Apparently the Coded UI test recorder does not record events (or most of them at least) generated by a QTP playback. That would have been a helpful shortcut to get started, but as I expected it looks like we will have to re-record all our automated tests from scratch.
Overall the move will provide some benefits such as being able to link test cases to bug and requirements work items, which we were not able to do before. Using the same programming language as our developers (C# in our case) should provide other benefits down the road. The VBScript language that QTP uses is very limited, especially in its data structures. Using a "real" programming language for automation will be refreshing.
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