Over the last 3 days, my team and I have been lucky enough to have been going through
formal training on Visual
Studio Team System, thanks to our newest teammate, Martin
Danner. Martin is a Microsoft MVP and VSTS expert and brings a wealth
of knowledge on the product to our team.
We dove into VSTS using the Conchango
Scrum Template for Team System that was developed in collaboration with Ken
Schwaber. The process that the template modeled is well suited for prescriptive
Scrum and we are excited by the possibilities of running a pilot with this system.
VSTS has so many genuinely useful parts and pieces that it is hard to pick
one area on which to focus. I will mention in this post that a data source
can drive Unit Tests in VS2005. Microsoft refers to this as Data
Driven Unit Testing and defines it this way:
A data-driven unit test is a unit test that is run repeatedly for each row in
a data source.
After digesting the implication of the test looping through data, realize that a data
source can be XML, or whatever the heck else you can get to bind data. In .Net
2.0, that is just about anything with hair on it. Specifically, imagine reading
the data source as XML from a URI over HTTP and manipulating the data in a data store
that is completely abstracted from the Unit Test itself.
This is practically a recipe for a front end tool that will bridge the gap between Unit
Testing and what Fitnesse has done for acceptance
and regression testing. Inevitably, someone will build a flexible front end
for an app that defines data structures to drive Unit Tests. Then developers
will hydrate the unit tests after the data for the test has been defined. Viola!
Fitnesse a la Team System.
Any guesses as to who will bite off on that project? Perhaps VSTS v2.0?