Lab Management Tutorials and Manual Testing Video

Greetings! It has been a while since the last post – I and my team have been preoccupied with work of course, wrapping up the Beta 1 release of VSTS 2010 and finishing up the remaining features for the Team Test and Lab Management products. The team also took a well deserved long weekend off to celebrate the accomplishments, and to gear up for the drive for the next Beta scheduled for later in the year. I am really looking forward to this phase – shipping world class products is always an exhilarating experience, and the end-game always pumps me up even more!

The weather too is shaping up nicely and that’s going to add to the zest as well. The two months of brutal summer is over in Hyderabad, and the monsoon is setting in. It is right now a bit humid, but the temperature on this Saturday morning is a nice 80 degrees, down from the 100+ even a few days back. Team members in the USA are enjoying the start of summer there, and the temperature in Redmond, WA is 73 degrees, and in Raleigh, NC is 76 degrees. So, that’s great weather all around!

The Beta 1 feedback is starting to come in. The feedback is positive. The value props, scenarios, and the feature set are resonating well. The team members are monitoring the feedback forums looking for cases where people might be having problems – those are areas we want to address and fix before we release.

I want to take this opportunity to point you to two specific blog posts from the product team.

The Lab Management team is running a sequence of tutorial like posts here. I talked to you about the high level concepts of the product in my last post. Since then, the team has posted two articles – one on creating Lab Environments, and another on automatically deploying bits on to the environments. Give those a read. The product is also getting good coverage at the www.virtualization.info site – one of most popular sites for the virtualization industry. Check out this post.

On the Team Test front, Brian Keller has just posted a video (about 25 minutes) where he talks about and demonstrates our Manual Testing solution. You can find the video here. You have read about the product offerings for the Generalist or Manual tester, and this video will give you a good view of those capabilities.

If you haven’t tried out the Beta 1 bits yet, I strongly recommend you do so and let us know your own opinion. You can find the information about the Beta here.

Do write back about your experience with the Beta 1 bits, and let me know if there are specific areas or capabilities that you would like to learn more about. I will be happy to talk about them in the future posts.

Enjoy the weather, where ever you are.

Cheers!