Microsoft s working on a new test tool. This one if for the people who you think of as testers, not the people MS calls “Software Engineers in Test.” The plain fact is that most testers I have known are technical power users with a nose for technology, but little in the way of programming skills.
These folks often come into engineering teams from other departments and are not programmers, although there may be some scripting skills or something. Now, this is not a bad thing, per se. There is definitely a role for this kind of testing and tester, IMO. Although some in the Agile crowd will claim success without these folks on their teams, I find that the best service performed by testers is often translating the intent of the product owner into failing tests. This is often a wonderful way to solidify requirements.
This is a very powerful role in the product development teams and now MS is targeting non-coding testers with Camano, a test creation, management, and execution console. Microsoft’s strategy here is to provide Visual Studio to code-producing developers and Camano to non-developer testers.
Camano specifically allows working with tests, but not code, like this:
| Create | Execute | |
| Manual Test | X | X |
| Record / Playback Test | X | X |
| Unit Tests | X |
The functionality that seems targeted at the Rosario release already rivals the big players like Mercury. This is going to matter.
Here is more detailed post on Camano functionality.