News

Visual Studio 2010 bridges the gap between developers and testers

By Binu Paul | Tuesday, 21 September 2010, 23:38 Hrs | 1 Comments

Visual Studio 2010 bridges the gap between developers and testers

Bangalore: One of the most commonly heard phrases between testers and developers in the development and testing cycle is "Well it worked on my machine," and "I can't reproduce the bug that you filed". It becomes a frustrated situation for the two genre of roles i.e. developers and testers during application development. However, this gap cannot be afforded during a software development lifecycle, which already reels in a certain amount of uncertainty blended with an inherent risk factor. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools have come into the purview to bridge this long drawn gap. For Microsoft who stepped into the realm with Visual Studio 2010 (VS2010), it's about helping to form integrated teams, where the flow of information from team member to team member is totally streamlined, thus decreasing the level of conflicts within the cycle.

In a conversation with SiliconIndia, Jason Zander, Corporate Vice President, Visual Studio; Amit Chatterjee, Managing Director of Microsoft India Development Centre and Brian Harry, Technical Fellow at Visual Studio explained how VS2010 tries to bridge the gap between developers and testers and how the various products in the ALM tool brings better collaboration between the two.

Diminishing conflicts via Lab Management
Today 70 percent of the testing done in the industry is done manually. This segment was not served with tools until now. So the testers had the case written in a paper or word document and they read it and drive the product along the test lines. Testers could report the bug as a defect but not fix it. So while noting down the details of the bug if they missed reporting any information, the reporting created confusion among the developers and testers. This aspect is now made easy by the right tools in place. "So, we've tweaked the ALM solutions via integrating modern tools for testers to ensure an integrated environment. Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 puts a halt to this 'bug ping-pong'. In fact the Lab Management solution in VS2010 extends the existing Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management platform to enable integrated Hyper-V based virtual machine management. Lab Management automates complex build-deploy-test workflows to optimize the build process, decrease risk and accelerate your time to market," says Zander.

Lab Management helps to reduce costs associated with setup, tear down and restoration of complex virtual environments to a known state for build automation, test execution and build deployment. This eliminates waste across the entire application lifecycle by allowing development and QA to work together to effectively optimize the build process and minimize regression testing efforts. Lab Management also enables customers to easily file 'rich actionable bugs' with links to environment snapshots that developers can use to recreate the tester's environments and identify issues. It enables the automation of build-deploy-test workflows to reduce the overall risk and accelerates time to market. Above all, Lab Management helps to streamline the collaboration between development, Quality Assurance and operations to help organizations achieve higher ROI.

Simplifying App Development
Organizations are constantly looking to address business needs with applications that are flexible and scalable enough to match those needs as they change; but the time and resources to build those applications are not always available. "Visual Studio LightSwitch helps developers to quickly and affordably build applications that integrate with their data systems and Web services, work with a variety of hosting and deployment options, and work with third-party plug-ins," says Chatterjee.

LightSwitch is intended for anyone who needs to quickly and affordably create business applications. It is also an ideal tool for professional developers who need to build great-looking customer applications and want to kick start the development with a business application based on the LightSwitch templates.

1 2 3 Next>

Don't Miss ( 1-5 of 25 )