Gavin Clarke at theRegister reports that:

Microsoft hopes to do for software testers what it's done for developers - turn them into "rock stars"

With Microsoft's recent launch of Visual Studio Team System 2005 (VSTS2005) which includes an array of integrated Testing Tools, it is clear that Microsoft's stance isn't just for the greater good of software development teams. Clearly, it is also intended to boost the market for Team System.

Whatever the motive, I see it as a good thing. Too many development teams underestimate the value that a talented and skilled tester can bring to a project. Having a large brand, like Microsoft, promoting and advocating better testing can only support improvements in the quality of software and perhaps contribute to fewer project failures in the industry.

It may spell doom for those testers who don't have the skills and aptitude to become 'Rock-Star' Testers. They will soon be replaced with people that do have what it takes but, perhaps in the past, had avoided Testing as a career due to a perception that it is undervalued. My experience is that the value placed on testers varies wildly across business sectors and, in some sectors, is in need of a boost.

Gavin goes on to link Microsoft's public test-advocacy to the development community's perception that Microsoft's latest Visual Studio offering has too many bugs. In relation to this, Gavin writes...

I took a first look at the VS 2005 load testing tool and am far less enthusiastic than Scott, Antony, and Alejandro. I haven’t found any meaningful documentation (other than a sequence of steps in simple cases) or white paper (although there are a few new interesting things there: load testing in a development IDE, using unit tests in load testing, a system of tests, etc.). Looks like Microsoft doesn’t allocate enough resources to really push it. So my guess that it will commoditize load testing further, but wouldn’t compete for the professional load testing market at least in this release.

Randy Miller (also known as Granville Miller) is author of Advanced Use Case Modeling and A Practical Guide to Extreme Programming.  He has spoken at many national events including OOPSLA, Web Services Edge, Software Development West, Microsoft TechEd and others.  He has also spoken for SPIN in the past (http://www.rtpspin.org). You can find out more about Randy's work from his blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/randymiller.  You can learn more about Visual Studio 2005 Team System at: http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/teamsystem.  And specifically about its plans to support the Agile methodology at: http://blogs.msdn.com/team_foundation/archive/2005/02/07/368599.aspx .

Another great article by Scott Barber Diagnosing Symptoms of Poor System Performance (see pp.14-20) continues to discuss practical approaches to diagnose problems. Together with the previous Scott’s article about the subject How to Identify the Usual Performance Suspects (see pp.20-29) it is a must reading for everyone testing performance.

A tool from Jim Newkirk that converts NUnit Test Code into tests compatible with Visual Studio 2005 Team System.

We can use macros to perform specific refactoring operations on our applications, something Microsoft or third-party vendors are never going to do for us. By writing macros we can make performing these refactorings easier and quicker than if we did them manually, always a sure-fire way to ensure that more of them will be done.

In this article I am going to cover a couple of hypothetical refactoring situations. I will identify the problem, the refactoring to be used, and then we will walk through creating the macro to make it easier to complete that refactoring.

Have seen a recording about VisualStudio 2005 Test Edition. Looks like their load testing tool is GUI-based, no scripting language (at least nothing was told about it). If it is this way, Microsoft is still far from being a real danger for major load testing tools. I think that GUI-based tools (like JMeter), while may be good in some cases, are inferior to tools with a good scripting language (lik

On Tuesday I attended Mercury NYC Local User Group. There were two presentations from Mercury – product update and business process testing. Most people were interested in functional testing.

Some things that were interesting for me:
- Mercury plans integration with the new VisualStudio, no details
- New TestDirector (for Quality Center 8.2) is re-written to J2EE, multiplatform now
- Quality Center 8.2 includes Actuate reports