Author: Jeff Levinson & Steven Borg
Publisher: Addison-Wesley, 2011
Pages: 336
ISBN: 978-0321734488
Aimed at: .NET developers
Rating: 4
Pros: A good overview
Cons: Lots of omissions
Reviewed by: Alex Armstong

Testing is a hot topic with everyone adopting test driven design in one  form or another. This book is about using Visual Studio 2010 together with Microsoft Test Professional 2010 - something I didn't know much about and previously had found the documentation difficult to navigate. This book has the advantage of have a logical and linear approach to subject.

Chapter 1 starts us off with an overview of the current state of testing. If you are already part of the testing community you can skip this chapter and possibly the next chapter on software quality and testing. Read both if you need a refresher course or just to establish the jargon to be used.

Chapter 3 is where we get started on something practical with Microsoft Test Manager. Here we have a walkthrough with lots of screen dumps of setting up a test plan.  The next chapter focuses on manual tests. Chapter 5 is on resolving bugs - mainly lifecycle tracking and using Intellitrace.

Chapter 6 moves on to automating test cases and it starts a fairly large chunk of the book devoted to this topic. My guess is that this is where most programmers are going to be most interested. Chapter 7 follows through with executing automated test cases and Chapter 8 looks at automated testing gotchas.

Notice that the book is not specifically about unit testing although this is covred in a section or two. It is more specifically on coded UI tests.

The final chapter deals with everyone's least favourite topic, reporting and metrics. Mostly these are just tedious tasks that have to be done.

There is a lot of testing and testing philosophy that the book doesn't cover - stress testing, fuzzing, load testing and so on. In the main what it does cover is fairly obvious stuff that shouldn't take you too long to figure out. There aren't any great revelations or even much personal spin on how to do things. Even so it helped me see how it all fitted together and gave me lots of clues as to what could be done easily and what was more difficult.

This isn't a book that will suit everyone but if you want to know about its subject matter, i.e a general view of testing in the Microsoft environment, then it is very good.