Of all the forms of testing there is one that simply cannot be skipped. It doesn’t matter how good your automated tests are, manual testing still has to be performed before an application ships. With the release of MS Test Manager 2012, Microsoft intends to make it manual tests significantly easier.
Microsoft Test Manager is based on the idea that bugs shouldn’t have to be reproducible before a developer looks at them. Instead of laboriously trying to recreate bugs, each action performed by the quality assurance analyst is recorded both visually and via IntelliTrace data. This information is then associated with the new bug report, giving the developer an unparalleled view into what happened.
MTM tests are essentially lists of steps that QA analysts need to perform. They are not entirely static however. Steps can be tagged with variables, allowing one test template to be reused for several actual tests where the only difference may be data points such as United States verses Canadian mailing addresses.
With MTM 2012, testers can work through test cases on remote devices such as Windows 8 tablets. When a bug report is created, a click by click breakdown of what happened on that device is created. Along with it is sent the name and steps for the test case.
QA analysts can also choose to enter exploratory testing mode. Known also as “Agile testing”, this mode is designed for situations where there are no pre-determined test steps and the analyst is just looking around. When a bug is found, the analyst gets to decide how many steps back in the log should be attached to the bug report. Furthermore, there is a facility to quickly create a new formal test case based on the actions that were just performed.
Microsoft Test Manager requires one of Visual Studio Test Professional, Visual Studio Premium, or Visual Studio Ultimate. In addition you will need a TFS Server Express or higher. Like the other express production TFS Server Express is free, but it only supports up to five developers.