Dave Donaldson

Test Manager Gone from VSTS Dev Edition

Friday, November 25 2005

Boy, did I get snookered. The lifecycle of VS2005 and VSTS included many CTPs and betas. Most of those were good, especially Beta 2 of VSTS. It was pretty much feature complete, it performed well, and was overall goodness. However, one thing that kind of went unnoticed with Beta 2 of VSTS was that it was the Team Suite edition, which means it included all features from each of the 3 VSTS editions: Architect, Developer, and Tester.

Then the Release Candidate was released. I didn't bother really looking at the RC because we were only about 6 weeks away from RTM and Beta 2 was working very well. I knew that once RTM went live, I would be using the Developer Edition of VSTS.

Once the RTM for VSTS Developer Edition was released and installed, one of the first things I noticed was that the Test Manager was gone. The Test Manager is what you use to, well, manage all your tests. You use it to organize your tests as you see fit, in particular by creating lists of tests (and nested lists of tests), thus allowing you to right-click on a list and run all the tests in that list. It was very, very nice. The epitome of goodness.

But that goodness is gone from the VSTS Dev Edition. All we get is the almost worthless Test View (no ordering, no lists, not much of anything to be honest). The Test Manager can be found in the VSTS Tester Edition, which obviously makes sense, but I think Microsoft messed this one up bad. Why would you include unit testing in your developer IDE yet not give them the ability to manage their unit tests? In other words, why only give that functionality to testers? Why not put Test Manager in both SKUs?

I've stated before that I'm a VSTS snob, but this decision to only put Test Manager in the VSTS Tester Edition really pisses me off. I think it was a terrible decision.