Lab Management in VSTS 2010

In my last post I had mentioned about the Lab Management Product and also pointed you to a channel 9 video about it. We first previewed this product in PDC 2008 and it was annouced in TechED EMEA on November 10th. Since then a lot of excitement has been building up around this product. Yesterday, S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President of the Developer Division in Microsoft blogged about it here. Here's an excert from Soma's post:

"...Developers are frustrated with too much bug “ping/pong” with their test counterparts and have a lack of access to distributed environments. Testers don’t get the right tools and right attention and after spending 30-50% of their test cycle time on test setup most of their bugs get resolved with a “not reproducible” resolution.

To address those challenges we set out some basic principles – a) environment set up should take minutes and not weeks, b) walls between developers and testers need to come down, c) build automation extends to environment provisioning, build deployment and testing, d) eliminate bug “ping/pong”."

I hope you find the time to read Soma's complete post.

This product is still under development and we have a few TAP (Technology Adoption Preview) customers trying it out. It will be available broadly as part of the Visual Studio 2010 Beta, coming up in a few months. Stay tuned ...

Amit