Testing for Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio 2012

As more software projects adopt a continuous delivery cycle, testing threatens to be the bottleneck in the process. Agile development frequently revisits each part of the source code, but every change requires a re-test of the product. While the skills of the manual tester are vital, purely manual testing can’t keep up. Visual Studio 2012 provides many features that remove roadblocks in the testing and debugging process and also help speed up and automate retesting. This guide shows you how to record and play back manual tests to reproduce bugs and verify the fixes, transform manual tests into code to speed up re-testing, monitor your project in terms of tests passed, create and use effective unit tests, load, and performance tests, run build-deploy-test workflows on virtual lab environments, and evolve your testing process to satisfy the demands of agile and continuous delivery. You’ll learn how to set up all the tools you need for testing in Visual Studio 2012 and 2010, including Team Foundation Server, the build system, test controllers and agents, SCVMM and Hyper-V. Each chapter is structured so that you can move gradually from entry-level to advanced usage.

Larry Brader has been a Senior Tester in the patterns & practices group at Microsoft for several years. He currently works as a test lead on the various p&p projects, focusing on client and server side. In addition he is interested in producing and shipping books of test guidance based on ALM. Before working at Microsoft, Larry worked on developing highly fault tolerant military & medical systems.

Howie Hilliker is a senior programming writer in Microsoft. He worked as a developer, network engineer and technical author prior to joining Microsoft in 1998. Howie has been on the Visual Studio Team System from its early development.

Alan Cameron Wills is a senior programming writer in Microsoft. He specializes in development tools and methods, subjects in which he was a consultant and writer before joining the company in 2004. His PhD thesis was on mathematical reasoning about programs-a subject closely akin to testing. He lives and works in the United Kingdom.

Book foreword by: Sam Guckenheimer