A look at test planning with Microsoft Test and Lab Manager. Part 1, getting organized

Let’s start with a high level look at the Test and Lab Manager.  Test and Lab Manager is broken into 3 different areas; Lab Center, Test Center, and Organize.  I’m not going to go into the lab center, I’m primarily going to look at the area of the product that a QA professional would use on a day to day basis. 

The Lab Center:

This is where you manage environments, test run settings, environment templates and test controllers. We’ll drill into a couple of these concepts later.

The Organize area:

Test Plan tab.

The Test Plan tab of the organize area is where you manage test plan definitions and their context. This page contains a list of all plans associated with a TFS project.

Configuration tab.

The configuration tab is used to manage the different configurations you want to use during testing.  In our example we have defined 4 configurations;

• Vista with .Net framework 3.5
• Vista with .Net framework 4.0
• Vista with the Firefox browser
• Vista with IE 7

The configuration variables are just name value pairs which may be managed by drilling into this tab.

Test Cases tab

Test Cases may be created copied and edited here.  This is a place QA can go to create test cases rather than using team explorer and visual studio.  The list is all test cases associated to the configured team project.  Note: the context at the top center of the screen is a link that may be used to change your team project.

Shared Steps tab:

The idea of a shared step is that you may define commonly executed testing steps in this one place (login for example). When defining other tests that include these common steps, you may reference this shared step rather than duplicating the steps necessary to perform the common task. Not only is it less work to create tests when you use shared steps (less typing) but maintaining this common logic is much simpler as a change to the common task only needs to be made in the shared step – not in every test that calls it.   

The shared steps tab is the place you would go to create, edit, copy, and record a shared step.  Like test plans and test cases, the list is all shared steps associated to a team project. 

In future posts I’ll go into more detail about creating the plans and tests as well as cover executing the test plans.

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