Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management Images

Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management Imagesby Darryl Taft

This screen shot shows a running Lab Environment “Zip Functional Test,” which has two virtual machines, a database server and a Web server. The active thumbnail images on the left show the state of these machines. The user can easily connect to the machines by double-clicking on the machine thumbnail or by choosing Connect from the toolbar. The user can interact with the individual machines through the Lab Environment viewer UI. Lab Management enables easy self-service of lab environments that have been created on their behalf by lab managers.

This screen shot shows an active environment as viewed from the Lab Environment viewer when the user either connects to the environment or double-clicks on a specific machine in the environment UI. This UI provides a first-class interface to the Lab Environment, where the user can interact with each of the machines as if connected locally. When a tester files a bug, one of the rich bug attachments is a link to the lab environment, so a developer can easily open the link to gain access to the same environment used by the tester to create the bug. This helps reduce or eliminate the “no repro” bug problem.

This screen shot shows Lab Management created custom build activities “Checkpoint Lab Environment,” “Web Setup’ and ‘DB Setup,’ enabling a user to take a checkpoint of the lab environment so she can restore the environment to a pristine baseline state very quickly and deploy the application under test to the lab environment to run tests. The workflow enables end-to-end automation of the build, deploy and test cycle, significantly improving the software development process.