Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2012

Chapter 23

Manual Testing

What's In This Chapter?

• Using Microsoft Test Manager to create and manage test plans
• Running test cases and publishing the results
• Conducting exploratory testing
• Taking advantage of fast-forward for manual testing to speed up test runs

Across the software development industry, manual testing still makes up about 70 percent of the testing efforts as compared to creating automated tests, or specialized testing efforts such as performance and scale testing. Yet, manual testing has historically been overlooked by most software development tool vendors. With Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft set about to fix that disparity by building an entirely new set of tools targeted specifically at the generalist tester. A generalist tester is a person who tests software manually by directly interacting with the software in the way a user might, and filing bugs when the tester encounters broken functionality or unexpected behavior. Microsoft has continued to improve that experience with Visual Studio 2012.

In this chapter, you learn how Visual Studio 2012 can make generalist testers more efficient at authoring, managing, and executing manual test cases. You begin to understand how the testing framework in Visual Studio 2012 bridges the gap between testers and developers by capturing rich diagnostics during test runs, which can then be analyzed by developers to help them diagnose and resolve bugs. You find out about the new exploratory testing approach enabled in this release, ...