Friday, March 21, 2008

Publishing Test Results using the Testers Edition of Visual Studio

I fully admit, I don't know anything about the Testers Edition of Visual Studio. However, since I know a bit about TFS, I've been asked a number of questions about how the two talk to each other. Thus it's been a learning experience for me!

Here is the way I understand the Test Results publishing process to TFS for the Tester Edition of VS. Again, this is all really new to me so if I have something wrong, please correct me.

Per the document here, I see that a Tester will run a test on their local machine or using the "rig" to run on remote machines. After the tests are run, test results are stored in *.trx file on the tester's machine. Testers then can open that file and "Publish" them to TFS's operational store (which must be the TfsBuilds database maybe?). That data then gets moved to the TfsWarehouse per the warehouse schedule. At this point, you can Report on it in the warehouse.

Now there seems to be one small deviation in that Load Tests need to be loaded to a local SQL database which is defined outside of TFS. That is, the Load Tests database stores Load Test data before it's published to TFS. There must be someway then that the Tester Edition of VS can look in that local database where the Load Test results are stored, and publish the results to TFS. I think this is an important detail as there may be some ambiguity on the difference between the Load Test database and the standard databases that make up TFS (e.g. TfsBuilds, TfsWarehouse, etc).

If I have anything wrong here, I'd love for you to share your insight as we're trying to put the big picture all together.

1 comment:

Jayesh Nazre said...

i think the missing link is as follows. The trx file contains the results for unit test as well as web test and does not require the sql server result store for data persistence as the test results are stored within the trx file. For Load test the test results are split between the trx file and the Result store (which is the sql server database, not the TFS database). The connection information for the database is contained within the trx files.
Now when it comes to publishing the test results to TFS all we need is the trx file, whether the test results is self contained or partially stored in the database, the trx file has all that info. Hope that connects the dots.