Defining Your Testing Effort Using Test Plans

You can use the Testing Center in Microsoft Test Manager from Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate or Visual Studio Test Professional to help you plan your testing effort, based on your approach. You create a test plan to define what you want to test and then you can measure your testing progress. Test plans can be as simple or as complex as you need, based on your testing approach. You might want to create a test plan for each sprint if you are using an agile methodology. Then you can add the user stories for each sprint to your test plan and create test cases for these user stories. Or, you might create a test plan for each specific milestone if you are using another approach.

Microsoft Test Manager enables you to do three important tasks, as shown in the following illustration:

Define Your Testing Effort

You can create test suites in your test plan to group your test cases into suites, based on your needs. You can add a requirement to form a suite in your plan that contains all the test cases that are linked to this requirement. You can assign a set of default configurations to your test plan that you want to cover for quality purposes. You will be able to view which tests have passed or failed for each configuration and how many tests you have left to run. The following illustration shows the key components that are part of your test plan.

Components of a Test Plan

For more information about strategies for testing, see Test Early and Often.

Tasks

Use the following topics to help plan your testing effort:

Tasks

Associated Topics

Select the Team Project that You Want to Use to Plan Your Tests: You add your test plan to a specific team project. This is where your test plan, test suites and test case information will be stored. Typically, this is the team project that is used for the requirements for your application under test.

Planning the Configuration Matrix for How You Plan to Run Your Tests: You can create test configurations to define the software or hardware that you want to use to run your tests. You can specify default configurations for your plan and which tests you plan to run on which configurations.

Planning the Environments You Need to Use for Your Testing: You can plan what environments you may want to set up to run your tests. These could be physical or virtual environments.

Creating Your Plan: You have to create a plan for your tests and add the test configurations that you want to use as your default configurations.

Adding Test Suites and Test Cases to Your Plan: You can create test suites to group your test cases together. You can create test suites based on requirements or user stories. You can also create suites by selecting existing test cases or adding new test cases. You can then add manual test steps to these test cases. You can also associate automated tests with your test cases so that you can run them from a plan.

Import Test Suites from Another Test Plan: You can import test suites from another test plan if you must have the same test suites in your current test plan.

Assigning Who Will Run the Tests: You can assign the tests in your test plan to specific testers on your team. By default, the tests are assigned to the owners of the test cases. But you can change this assignment.

Setting Up How to Run Your Tests: You can use test settings to define how you will run your tests from your test plan. You can run tests locally and collect information remotely, or you can run automated tests remotely.

Connecting to a Different Test Plan for Your Team Project: You can view all the test plans for your team project in order to find a specific plan that you want to use. You can also create a URL to connect to a specific test plan. You can share this URL with your team.

Running Tests

You can run the tests that you have created and record the results.

Reporting on Testing Progress for Test Plans

You can measure the progress of your testing against your test plan and see the test results.

Keyboard Shortcuts for Microsoft Test Manager

You can use keyboard shortcuts to more quickly accomplish tasks with Microsoft Test Manager.

Reviewing Your Test Plan

After you create a test plan, you might want to review the test plan to make sure that the test cases cover the key functionality of the application. This might be easier to accomplish by using a Microsoft Word document that you have created. You can use the Test Scribe power tool to create a word document from your test plan. Using this word document, anyone can review the test cases in the test plan without having to open each test case.

See Also

Tasks

Quick Start Guide for Manual Testing using Microsoft Test Manager

Concepts

Testing the Application

Managing New Testing Efforts