D. German said
I ordered this book to help me out on my job. So far, it has been a great help.
E. Jones said
This book was a decent entry level guide to the Visual Studio Testing suite 2005. However, it comes up woefully short with regards to many aspects of the tools. I got a good deal of knowledge for using VSTS from the MSDN pages.
I haven't gotten the 2008 edition of this book and in fact I have moved back into the J2EE world. However, for most things, I would probably say that using the MSDN blogs featuring Ed Glas and company is the way to go.
There decent examples of the performance test tool in the most basic HTTP cases. But if you want to build performance tests around another protocol (such as FTP) they don't give good guidance on how to wrap this in a unit test and how to effectively grab metrics on virtual user threads, how the Unit test facility doesn't work with the IP Address Switcher, how to actually get the facilities that use the IP Address Switcher (an extra set of packages) and a few other issues.
If you've got to have a book in hand with the red cover and pictures of the authors, then go for it. Otherwise, check out the MSDN blogs first. They don't tell you everything, but the bloggers are relatively responsive and aren't nasty like the mods on many a tech forum!
Maksym Volkov said
Precondition: I also went through chapters 1 to 4, for my interest was in Database testing.
Pro: This is a nice intro into testing databases using VSTS, the only product that I know does that. If you want to see some bits of what can be done using this instrument - go for it. A piece on enhancing built-in functionality with recordsets counter is definitely a nice one - a must-read for anyone who wants to do more realistic testing than what MS offers out of the box!
Contra: I expected to see how to construct a solid framework for testing industrial-scale applications but failed short of it. Namely, I could not find the discussion of how to set up the whole facilities, how to run tests as a batch from outside the Studio - our SCM/Build Team does not open Visual Studio to run their operations overnight, you see. I could not find detailed discussion of Pre/Post events, yet this seems to be absolutely essential for any serious testing: you need to have some known state of DB before you run your tests and you should be able to restore that state (efficiently, so backup/restore of multi-Gig DBs is not a viable option) to run other tests (DB and non-DB).
Overall a nice intro, but I had to refer to online help from MSDN more often than I would love to, on having read the book pretending to be more or less coverage of the material. Still a good buy for the money. Looking forward to see a manual that covers DB testing in greater depth.
Steven L. Shippee said
The previous reviews I read about this book gave great praise. And all that they said is true, the book is well written, clear, concise, and easy to understand - with rich wonderful hands on examples and source code. A wonderful entry into the Microsoft offerings of testing right along with software development.
What makes this an even better buy or value added product is that if there is an issue with why things work (or don't work the way they should) the author(s) will follow up with you in an attempt to clear up any misunderstandings.
Not only is it a very good read, the authors can and do add additional value to the book long after it has been paid for - should there be any questions upon anything contained in the text - something that is very unusual in this realm or domain. I can not say enough about the quality of this book and the quality of the service one gets should they have a need to contact one of the authors - in my case it was Andy Leonard - who kept helping with something that wasn't even his issue - it was one of those undocumented Microsoft "features".
T. Arnold said
Some coders may turn away from this book because it has "testing" in the title. Some test engineers who don't code may also waffle when they see source code examples written in C# included in the book.
This book truly caters to both programmers (developers and technical testers: unit testing, code coverage, dynamic analysis, static analysis / fx cop, profiling, unit testing against a database, data-driven testing, build verification testing) as well as testers without a programming background (recorded web testing, load testing, manual testing, test library management).
Because the line between programmer and tester becomes more difficult to define -- especially with today's software test engineers who are also hard core coders and developers who write their own test suites -- this book provides everything the programmer needs as well as everything the test engineer needs when looking to get started and utilize the incredible set of tools the team at Microsoft added into Visual Studio Team System.
(This book also explores how these tools are integrated into Team Foundation Server (including check-in policies, automated testing of builds, associating bugs and tests, and more) -- so in many cases, this book not only applies to testers and developers, it will also be of interest to technical program / project managers, dev managers and test managers).
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