Visual Studio Overview

Application Lifecycle Management is the coordination of all aspects of software engineering - including the formulation and communication of business and technical requirements, code design and architecture, project tracking, change management, coding, testing, debugging, and release management—by using tools that facilitate and track collaboration among and within work teams.

The Visual studio 2010 product integrates seamlessly with the rest of the Microsoft product set to provide extensibility to develop the ideal solution for you.  Team Foundation server is the central repository for all the components within the ALM and provides the communications link between each of the areas. For example, reporting a bug found by a member of the QA team is reported through TFS to a member of the development team for fixing. The message sent from the Tester to the developer can range from a simple description of the bug to video recordings, environment detail and more. This flexibility ensures faster bug fixes and therefore faster delivery of the project.

The diagram below illustrates the detailed components within Visual Studio 2010

The Testing within ALM is increasingly taking prominence to the rest of the ALM components as businesses become increasingly dependent on IT.  Visual Studio 2010 Test Elements consists of the following set of tools to assist within the Testing Life Cycle.

Unit Testing - This facility allows developers to create and execute unit testing so that the quality of the developed code is improved.

      For more information, please refer to the Unit Testing section.


Test Manager - Test & Lab Center assists customers in managing the Manual Testing phase and allows customers to take advantage of virtualisation to manage the environments needed to execute the tests.      

        For more information, please refer to the Test Manager section.


Coded UI Test - Coded UI Testing  provides  a complete automated testing solution for functional, graphical user interface, and regression testing that helps you reduce the risks of application failures. This software testing solution enables your QA team to identify and correct defects across a wide breath of application environments, data sets and business processes.  The QA team can, whilst executing functional  tests, record the test case. This can be replayed back, and then passed back to the developers to turn it into a robust, maintainable automated test script.

        For more information, please refer to the Coded UI Test section.

Performance Testing - Visual Studio 2010’s performance testing capability provides an easy-to-use load and stress testing solution for optimising the performance of business applications. Easy-to-create, accurate and realistic tests simulate hundreds to thousands users in a wide range of enterprise environments and platforms. The tests isolate issues and bottlenecks that could impact reliability, performance and scalability. 
    
        For more information, please refer to the Performance Capability section.