April 2010
Fewer vendors, less integration, less software, is this possible?
For years the software industry has been faced with the need to use a wide variety of software development and testing tools in order to deliver an IT project. The challenge has always been to select the best tools both for the job and also for their ability to integrate together.
In fact, the challenge is threefold. First, how to makethe most out of as few tools as possible to keepcosts down. The second, is that having selected a variety of different tools, often from differentvendors, integrating these tools inevitably leads to challenges and frustrations when project timelinesare paramount to delivering a system. The third is to have a common view across the development lifecycle, which is challenged by tools reporting information in different ways and not telling aconsistent or complete story. This disparity ininformation caused by the loose integration of tools, results in project stakeholders not having access tothe same information, which can lead to making misinformed decisions and even lead to conflicts between teams and individuals.
Microsoft is the first software vendor to recognise these challenges by developing an integrated platform, which addresses a wide variety oftechnical and business challenges, all with a single aim: To provide one development platform for all. With Visual Studio 2010 Microsoft has provided an integrated platform for development, testing, and the provisioning of environments. What is particularly interesting about Visual Studio 2010 is that it addresses many of the problems traditionally encountered in managing quality and testing in software development.
In particular, the addition of a testing suite, which both integrates with and compliments the developer tools, is a major step forward and puts Microsoft atthe front in delivering a solution to the challenges that the market has been experiencing for years. |
As well as ensuring that the testing suite provides the tools to manage testing, perform test automation and deliver load and performance testing, Visual Studio 2010 also includes innovative features which enable testing to be introduced earlier in the lifecycle, improving the accuracy and reducing the overall effortrequired.
Some examples of this are the shared use of requirements to drive both development and testing, which ensures that both the code and the tests are driven by the same data. For manual test execution, Visual Studio 2010 has introduced Test Runner which automates the data input required for manual testing and significantly reduces the amount of time required for a test run, improving testing accuracy. Early performance testing has also always been a challenge and Visual Studio 2010 addresses this by incorporating unit tests into load test scripts to facilitate component testing.
Probably the greatest benefit of the integrated development and testing environment is the ability to implement risk based testing, driven by code coverage showing which tests are affected by a code change. The code coverage feature significantly reduces the amount of testing required for any change and increases the confidence that the change has been sufficiently tested.
So what are the challenges to consider when adopting Visual Studio 2010 for testing?
Most organisations have some or all of their test assets stored in testing tools. Other than for managing and executing testing, these tools are relied upon for producing status and progress reports for development projects. When the Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is introduced into the software development lifecycle there will be questions which need to be answered in order to fit the new tool into the corporate development environment, with minimum disruption. Some organisations will be ableto migrate completely to Visual Studio 2010 and others who have made sizeable investments in other tools, will maintain their existing tools, and investment, and will need a solution for reporting across several systems.
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