James Whittaker best describes the intent of the site:
At the Tester Center, our goal is to provide a community where software testers can share knowledge and learn from each other about testing, our day-to-day job functions, processes, the tools we use, and the various roles we play.
Focus on the test discipline within the Microsoft developer community has often been an overlooked aspect of the software development lifecycle. This is exemplified by the lack of test tooling within the Visual Studio development environment itself until recent versions of Visual Studio Team System. However, the Visual Studio Team System SKU of Visual Studio was often too expensive for many organizations leaving many developers to fend for themselves.
Microsoft answered this complaint by adding the majority of VSTS unit testing features into the Visual Studio Professional version of Visual Studio 2008. Program Manager Naysawn Naderi made this announcement back in March 2007:
We are in general very open to the concept of trickling down other functionality introduced in Team System into other SKUs over time, so please let us know if you feel that other items should trickle down as well.
Many feel Microsft has not gone far enough. A common response is similar to the following posted by a developer identifying himself only as dono:
It's nice that Pro will finally have unit testing. However, it really belongs in all versions, most importantly Express.... while I applaud your decision to include them in Pro, I really do not think it is enough. Note that your competition, such as Eclipse, includes integrated JUnit support in all versions (free).
What do you think of Microsoft's announcement and renewed focus on the software testing role in the Software Development Lifecycle?
