Grant Holliday

In my last blog post I explained what Camano is and how you use it to for planning a testing effort. Now I’m going to look at the Manual Test Runner which is included in the November CTP of Visual Studio Team System Code Name “Rosario”.

To start the Manual Test Runner we first open the standalone test case management tool - Camano and select the Testing Activity Center within it. If your previously created Test Plans don’t show up, you’ll need to press Refresh. Then select a Test Case and select Start Testing to start the Manual Test Runner for this Test Case.

The Manual Test Runner is a lightweight application that can install and run without administrative privileges on your test machines. It displays the steps from the Test Case and allows you to record the actual results and publish them back into TFS.

The killer feature for me is integrated video, keystroke and action recording. If you hover over the Start Test Case link, it brings up a balloon which allows you to edit the video settings. You can edit the recording types by selecting Edit…

Now we’re ready to start the test case, so we press Start Test Case, and the recording starts.

After starting the test case, I swap back to Internet Explorer and enter the Hotmail URL. When the page loads successfully I mark the step as successful by clicking on the icon.

Then I select the next step in the test case and perform the specified steps. Once the test run is complete I can view the test results in three formats. The files are stored in %TEMP% until the results are optionally published to TFS.

• Video Recording in WMV video format
• XML test actions & results
• Text File of actions performed

The UITest XML file includes all the actions performed and objected changed. It’s very detailed.

The ActionLog.txt file includes a very slim dialogue of what the tester did.

Then there’s the WMV video. It records at full resolution, 500kbps, 24bit colour. And for my 1 minute test run at 1200×700 the video size is only 68 Kb! Keeping the file size to a reasonable size is very important, because once we publish these test results, the video gets attached to the Test Case work item in the TFS database.

You can create bugs from within the Manual Test Runner by simply clicking an icon on the toolbar. All the context and results from the test run are copied to the bug. The developer now has maximum information and context for fixing the bug.

I love the Repro Steps and the hyperlinks to markers within the video recording. If you click one of these, the video loads in Windows Media Player and skips exactly to that point in time.

It also captures basic system information of the current computer:

That’s it for the Manual Test Runner in the current CTP. I can’t wait to start using these tools on a real project. All things considered I think this is a very solid step into the manual testing arena.