Professional Team Foundation Server

13.4. Managing Test Cases

One of the management tasks that run concurrently with your development includes test case management. Good code is derived from good tests. Moreover, as with any aspect of a software development project, careful planning will determine the effectiveness of your test approach. Truth be told, it's easy to get lost in all of Team System's testing capabilities. This section runs through a practical scenario and shows you how tests are managed end-to-end.

NOTE

In this section, we are assuming you are familiar with Team System tests, have successfully run them, and so forth. If you are new to the Team System Test Framework, we greatly encourage that you read and try the demos and walkthroughs for Team Edition for Software Testers on the MSDN Web site (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182409.aspx) or look at Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System (ISBN:0764584367) for a deeper exploration of the topic.

Test case management involves more than the organization of tests. You need to manage how to properly write test specifications, how to automate and monitor your test runs, how to write effective bug work items, and so forth. The diagram in Figure 13-31 shows one of the many ways tests cases can be managed within Team System.

As you can see, test cases are written in parallel with the development workflow to verify the functionality of each feature (or task). Let's look at the process if you are using MSF for Agile Software Development. At the ...