Creating Manual Test Cases

You can create manual test cases to test your application using Microsoft Test Manager. In a manual test case, you can document all the required test steps for a specific scenario and any other information that you must have to run the manual test. This might include attaching files to the manual test case. You must add your manual test cases to a test plan to be able to run them using Test Runner. By adding your manual test cases to a plan you can save the results every time that you run your test.

Note

To add manual test cases into your test plan, you must use Microsoft Test Manager. A test case is a work item; therefore, it can also be viewed and edited like any other work item from Visual Studio. However, to edit the test steps, you must use Microsoft Test Manager.

Requirements

  • Visual Studio Ultimate, Visual Studio Premium, Visual Studio Test Professional

Tip

You can now perform exploratory testing. Exploratory testing is the testing of an application without a set of tests defined in advance. During an exploratory test session, you are not restricted to a script or a set of predetermined steps as you are with a manual test. You can run an exploratory test that is either associated with a requirements category work item type, for example a user story. An exploratory test session can also simply be run simply by starting a session. This is referred to as a non-specific exploratory test session. As with manual tests, you can submit bugs with action steps, comments, screenshots, file attachments, and video or voice recordings that you add when you run your exploratory tests. Additionally, you can create manual test cases from the action steps that are recorded during your exploratory testing session. For more information, see Performing Exploratory Testing Using Microsoft Test Manager.

Tasks

Use the following topics to help you create manual test cases:

Tasks

Associated Topics

Creating a Manual Test Case: You can create a manual test case with both action and validation test steps using Microsoft Test Manager. You can also add test steps by copying and pasting from Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word.

In addition, you can add parameters to a manual test case to run the test multiple times with different data.

Speed Up Manual Test Case Creation: You can create a copy of an existing manual test case as a starting point to create another test case. You can create a test case from Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word. You can copy and paste test steps from other test cases. Or you can use actions that you record when you run a test to create a test case.

Reduce Maintenance by Sharing Test Steps: You can share test steps between manual test cases. For example, if each test case has to log on to the application under test, you can create shared steps to perform these actions and add it to each test case.

In addition, you can add parameters to your shared steps to use them in test cases where you want to run the test multiple times with different data.

Remove a Test Case That Is No Longer Required: If a test case is no longer required to test your application, then you can change the state of the test case to closed.

Update Multiple Test Cases at the Same Time: If you want to update the same field for multiple test cases, you can select the test cases using Visual Studio and then perform a bulk update of the fields in multiple test cases using Microsoft Excel. For example, you might want to change the iteration for a group of test cases.

Customize a Test Case Work Item Type: If the Test Case work item type that is provided in your team project does not meet your needs, you can create your own or customize one of the provided types.

Running Manual Tests Using Test Runner

You can run the manual test cases that you have created and record the results.

How to: Search for Test Cases from Microsoft Test Manager

To find specific test cases, you can search for them.

Organizing Test Cases Using Test Suites

You can organize your test cases into test suites. This makes it easier to find test cases and you can also run all the tests in a test suite.

External resources

Guidance

Testing for Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio 2012 – Chapter 4: Manual System Tests

See Also

Concepts

Creating and Managing Tests