Professional Software Testing with Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Tools for Software Developers and Test Engineers [Paperback]

Tom Arnold (Author), Dominic Hopton (Author), Andy Leonard (Author), Mike Frost (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 11, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0470149787 | ISBN-13: 978-0470149782 | Edition: 1

• Visual Studio 2005 Team System (VSTS) features a robust, integrated suite of test tools that work seamlessly in the Visual Studio development environment
• Covering all phases of the development lifecycle, this book shows readers how to implement best practices for software testing using the appropriate components of VSTS
• Readers will learn how to use the tools effectively, directly from those who helped design and develop the software
• Shows how to catch common programming mistakes every time code is compiled, helping to shorten the time to market

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

With the introduction of Visual Studio 2005 Team System (VSTS), Microsoft for the first time offers software developers and test engineers a complete and integrated suite of tools for software testing. This authoritative book shares with you best practices for software testing using VSTS test and development tools and covers all phases of the development lifecycle so that you may learn how to implement these practices.

Written by key members of the team that developed the VSTS test anddevelopment tools, this essential resource offers a no-nonsense introduction to using the tools the way they were meant to be used. The authors walk you through the overall user interface of the Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Developers and Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers. You'll explore each of the available test types and learn how to effectively use the code analysis and dynamic analysis tools to quickly become effective as a software developer or test engineer.

What you will learn from this book

• Load Test your applications, potentially with thousands of simulated users, and leverage new and existing automated tests

• Create Web Tests by recording interactions with web applications and (optionally) render those tests to your favorite .NET language

• Test your database back-end's design and integrity using unit tests

• Incorporate data-driven testing into your automated tests to enhance your testing library

Who this book is for

This book is for software developers and test engineers who want to understand best practices for using VSTS test and development tools. Experience with Visual Studio is recommended.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

About the Author

Tom Arnold was a program manager for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System, specifically for the testing tools. He has also managed other commercial testing tools projects by Microsoft and Rational Software and has spoken at such industry conferences as STAR, Microsoft Tech Ed, Internet World, and many others. In addition to two other books on software testing, he has produced three video series on the topic and co-founded a 250-employee software testing company (later sold to Lionbridge/Veritest). Tom is currently a program manager at Microsoft on the OfficeLive.com team.

Dominic Hopton is a software development engineer on the Visual Studio Enterprise Test team at Microsoft. One of the original team members, Dominic helped fashion the new development and testing tools in Visual Studio 2005. He is currently working on the next version of testing tools for Visual Studio.

Andy Leonard is a SQL Server database developer, MVP, and engineer. He is a co-author of Professional SQL Server 2005 Integration Services. He founded and manages VSTeamSystemCentral.com. Andy’s experience includes web application architecture and development, VB.NET, ASP, and ASP.NET; SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS); data warehouse development using SQL Server 2000 and 2005; and test-driven database development.

Mike Frost is a senior "software design engineer in test" (i.e., a software tester who mostly writes code) at Microsoft. Over the last 10 years he has worked on several releases of Visual Studio with a focus on the infrastructure and architecture used for testing software. Currently he is working on the new OfficeLive.com service product.

Product Details

• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: Wrox; 1 edition (September 11, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470149787
• ISBN-13: 978-0470149782
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 1 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,491,831 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Software Testing with Visual Studio 2005 Team System January 28, 2008

By Steven L. Shippee

Format:Paperback

The previous reviews I read about this book gave great praise. And all that they said is true, the book is well written, clear, concise, and easy to understand - with rich wonderful hands on examples and source code. A wonderful entry into the Microsoft offerings of testing right along with software development.

What makes this an even better buy or value added product is that if there is an issue with why things work (or don't work the way they should) the author(s) will follow up with you in an attempt to clear up any misunderstandings.

Not only is it a very good read, the authors can and do add additional value to the book long after it has been paid for - should there be any questions upon anything contained in the text - something that is very unusual in this realm or domain. I can not say enough about the quality of this book and the quality of the service one gets should they have a need to contact one of the authors - in my case it was Andy Leonard - who kept helping with something that wasn't even his issue - it was one of those undocumented Microsoft "features".

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars great tools!! September 2, 2007

By Valerie Winterholler

Format:Paperback

What a fantastic book!! It has helped my software developers and test engineers to better utilize all the tools available to them! The authors are articulate and knowledgeable of the subject. Highly reccomended late night reading!!

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Fair to middling... December 30, 2008

By E. Jones

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book was a decent entry level guide to the Visual Studio Testing suite 2005. However, it comes up woefully short with regards to many aspects of the tools. I got a good deal of knowledge for using VSTS from the MSDN pages.

I haven't gotten the 2008 edition of this book and in fact I have moved back into the J2EE world. However, for most things, I would probably say that using the MSDN blogs featuring Ed Glas and company is the way to go.

There decent examples of the performance test tool in the most basic HTTP cases. But if you want to build performance tests around another protocol (such as FTP) they don't give good guidance on how to wrap this in a unit test and how to effectively grab metrics on virtual user threads, how the Unit test facility doesn't work with the IP Address Switcher, how to actually get the facilities that use the IP Address Switcher (an extra set of packages) and a few other issues.

If you've got to have a book in hand with the red cover and pictures of the authors, then go for it. Otherwise, check out the MSDN blogs first. They don't tell you everything, but the bloggers are relatively responsive and aren't nasty like the mods on many a tech forum!