If you don’t have a free subscription to Testing Experience  yet now is definitely a great time to sign up as they have a new article on Intellitrace!

Always Know What’s Going On

Successful Quality Management with Visual Studio IntelliTrace

Software development can be nerve-wracking. As a developer, you often think that the work is completed once the software has been checked in. However, this often does not take into account quality assurance, which may then discover many surprising errors in the software after all, even though the subject of examination has already undergone its component tests successfully. Since these tests are often undertaken in a black-box proce- dure, analyzing the causes may become a tedious task for the developer. Now IntelliTrace from the new Visual Studio 2013 could unveil the non-transparent func- tional behavior of these system tests. Additionally, this article presents you with the latest features of the recently released 2013 version. The article will be rounded off by a look at the 2014 Visual Studio version. This way, you can already explain to your colleagues today where Visual Studio’s future will take you.

Quality is expensive. Test teams or even test laboratories require an accordingly large budget. Requests and clarifications initiated by test engineers keep developers from doing their actual work. The time frame is threatened by the large numbers of errors and the customer is easily convinced by the cheapest offer. Decision-makers in the software industry often bring up these or similar arguments when discussing software quality or software testing. They sound almost like excuses to avoid having to introduce extensive quality assurance strategies. To make it clear from the start: The introduction of a QM system is fundamentally a cost factor not to be underestimated. Generally, all processes of a company are affected when introducing a system and these processes must adapt to the stringent requirements. Test sys- tems are also not estimated high enough with regard to their actual acquisition and, especially, maintenance costs – irrespective of the line of business. This is also true for the software industry.

End of Excerpt – please see Testing Experience  for the entire article

By Torsten Zimmermann & Frank Maar