Test Planning in TFS 2010 Test Manager

There is a new and better way for planning and managing manual test passes/runs with TFS (Team Foundation Server) 2010. The first most important change is that, there is no more a need to maintain thousands of .mht files in test projects for manual tests like in version 2008. You also don’t have to maintain your manual tests in via Test list editor (.vsmdi). Now, all the manual test cases reside in TFS database and are maintained there. A manual test case is just like any other workitem. The Test Edition or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate comes with a new tool called Microsoft Test Manager 2010. Lets see some of the basic test planning features.

After installing Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, you will find a new application along with your usual VS 2010 executables. Click on Microsoft Test Manager 2010. You will see below window where you have to connect to a TFS server and then select the team project on that server. Click Connect now.

Once connected, the next window lists all the test plans created under that project. You can add or jump on different test plans from this window.

Select/add a test plan and proceed by selecting – Select plan,

You will see “Contents” view of the test plan by default, I will come to this in a min. Click on the “Properties” tab. Here you can set all the properties for the test plan. Most important ones are –

Area path, iteration so that the results are logged against correct product version. Useful mainly for reporting.
Builds – to have some advanced features like - “Recommended tests” etc. to work, it is better you set a build associated with a test plan. Also helpful for build-wise reporting and tracking.

Other optional areas based on the application under test can be configured here like “Configurations”. If you have a test lab set up through this tool, you may choose to set the test environments for manual and automated tests. I am not going to talk about that here.

With some basic things in place, it is time to add test cases to the test plan. Simplest way is to click on “Add” button and query for your desired tests to add them directly under the test plan.

Or you can choose to be more organized by -

Creating a test suite under the plan and then add tests,
Creating a query based test suite,
If you have test cases associated with a User Story, you can add the user story to the test plan to test/run all the associated tests.

I usually have a combination of all three.

Once you have all the required tests that you want to run on that particular build of the application under test on the specified environment(s), you are almost done. You may want to do one last thing before the testing actually begins, that is assign test cases to different testers for execution. To do so, select one/more test cases from the test plan and click on “Assign”.

Select the tester from the dropdown and click on Save Assignment. Now, when the tester uses a pre-built query “My Test cases” in TFS or is viewing a (default) TFS dashboard, he will see these tests assigned to him/her and can then take appropriate action on them/execute them.

At this point, your plan is all set to be executed.