Hello from the Visual Studio Test Business …

Article
12/06/2008

Greetings!

This being my first blog let me take a moment to introduce myself. I am Amit Chatterjee and I run the Visual Studio Test Business unit that is part of the Visual Studio Team Systems (VSTS) business in the Developer Division at Microsoft. I have been in this role for a year and a half, though I have now completed twenty years at Microsoft.

As Microsoft enters the software quality industry, I am very excited about the innovations that we can deliver to improve the lives of our customers – testers and developers in software development teams. We started our mission with a simple idea that Great Tools help make Great Testers who in turn make sure that we, as an industry, build Great Software. We have built our business around this simple vision – Great Tools, Great Testers, Great Software – and have passionately been busy making the vision a reality.

Our current set of products under development are focused on bringing new insights into driving quality upstream and democratizing testing tools in the ALM space . Our goal is to elevate the role of the tester to be first class citizens in software development cycle, and to build bridges between developers and testers. The pre beta version of our latest products has just been released as part of Visual Studio 2010 Customer Technology Preview (CTP) release.

With the CTP release, we have enabled several key scenarios that drive our vision. I would like to highlight one such scenario around creating better bugs. Using current tools, a bug is at best a hint at the location of an issue in code. Developers and testers often waste a great deal of valuable time trying to find a repeatable repro case for the bug. During this effort the tester or developer painstakingly extracts information from the application and adds it to the bug, often passing the bug back and forth between developer and tester in a game of dev-test ping pong. Now as you test using our new Microsoft Test Runner (MTR), we will automatically collect a ton of information for you – information you can then pass on to the developer in a bug with a single click of a button. The data we collect includes actual steps that the tester took, video of the testers desktop, information about the test system, historical debugging logs, or even the complete virtual environment.

Our goal is that such high quality bugs take the “no repro” problem out of the question. Imagine how effective this makes the developers! As the developer opens the bug in his development environment he can find out about the system information, look at the video to see the exact scenario, and review the actual steps performed by the user. The developer can also load the historical debugging information in the debugger to see exactly what was happening in the application at the time of the error and during the time leading up to the error, including threads, stacks, and variable values, as well as system information such as access to files and the registry. The icing on the cake is that the developer also has access to the complete virtualized snapshot of the systems at the time of the bug atthe click of the mouse!

Please download the CTP release from here , play with it, and let us know about your experience.

You can also watch recent channel9 posts about what you can expect with our products, glimpses of the features in our Team Test product, as well as the capabilities of the Lab Management product.

Many of my team members are active on the blogosphere and you can find useful information about the product and our team from their postings. Here are some …

https://blogs.msdn.com/james_whittaker

https://blogs.msdn.com/euanga

https://blogs.msdn.com/edglas

https://blogs.msdn.com/anutthara

https://blogs.msdn.com/slumley

https://blogs.msdn.com/billbar

https://blogs.msdn.com/densto

https://blogs.msdn.com/vstsqualitytools

https://blogs.msdn.com/lab_management

Well, it feels nice to reach out to you! I look forward to hearing from you, and engaging further around the exciting products we are building.

Amit Chatterjee,

General Manager,