Automatic Feedback on TFS/VSTS Test Case Quality in Real Time
Team Foundation Server (TFS) and its software-as-a-service counterpart Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) are widely used application lifecycle management (ALM) and test management tools. They offer many great facilities to create tests, manage test plans, and execute them. Consequently, many of our clients as well as prospective customers wanted to use our test improvement software Test Scout along with TFS/VSTS to improve the test case quality. So, here is the question that we always face: How do we get the data from a testing tool into the Test Scout? As always in life, there is a straightforward and a fancy solution. Let me show you what I mean.
First: a simple integration
Test Scout is able to process almost any kind of text format. So, integrating test management tools such as TFS/VSTS is quite straightforward: For each test management tool, we created exports, which we imported into the Scout. For HP ALM, for example, we use a simple script to create a database dump containing all currently existing test cases. We then automatically imported and processed this data in Test Scout to evaluate the test case quality. Since Test Scout keeps versions of each import in its database, the history of all test cases is available in Test Scout. Therefore, all features, such as comparing different versions of test cases and historical development of test cases still works out of the box.
Why test clones mess with your test quality – And how to avoid them
I recently reviewed a manual test suite of one of our customers. One of the first things I check very early in a review is the number of clones (i.e. duplicated parts of a test suite, usually created by copy and paste). In this recent case, I discovered that nearly 70% of the test suite is duplicated. That means, when I take some arbitrary test step, the chance is 70% that the test step is a 1:1 copy of another step. At the top of the post is a tree map that visualizes the amount of clones I found. Each rectangle represents a test, the more red a rectangle is, the bigger the amount of cloning. In my experience, cloning in test suites is the biggest problem with regard to maintainability of a test suite. Cloning causes considerable costs as the effectiveness of the test suite decreases and the effort for maintenance rockets. In this post I take a closer look on cloning in test suites. I show you an example to illustrate how clones can look like and explain where clones come from. Later, I give you good reasons why you should care about clones in tests and discusss strategies you can employ to avoid or at least deal with clones.