Test Scribe for Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and Test Professional 2010

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NOTE: Test Scribe will not be receiving any further updates. All the functionality from Test Scribe (& a lot more) has been added to the product itself – take a look at the “Export test artifacts” capability:  

Exporting test artifacts

Export test outcomes

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Overview

Test Scribe is a documentation power tool designed to construct documents directly from the TFS for test plan and test run artifacts for the purpose of discussion, reporting etc.

Installation

Test Scribe needs to be installed as an add-on power tool to Microsoft Test Manager (MTM) which is included in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 Editions. Download Test Scribe and run the executable on the machine where MTM is installed. If MTM is not installed, the Test Scribe installation package will take you to the Visual Studio landing page where you can find out more about the various editions of Visual Studio 2010.

If you had previously installed Microsoft Test Manager as part of Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional edition, you will also need to install Team Explorer on the same machine in order to generate documents using Test Scribe.

Figure 1.0 – Team Explorer option in Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional installer

Usage

Launch Microsoft Test Manager and connect to a particular test plan. Select the “Tools” center by picking Tools from the drop down as shown below:

Figure 2.0 – The “Tools” center installed as part of Microsoft Test Manager

From the “Test Plan Summary” section, you can select a particular test plan, right click and select “Generate”. This will generate a document for the selected test plan. The generation time will vary depending on the connection speed, amount of data and machine configuration. The output document will contain (among other things) the test plan details, the suite hierarchy and the set of test cases with test steps inside each test suite.

From the “Test Run Summary” section, you can select a particular test run in the connected test plan, right click and select “Generate” to create a document for the selected test run. The output document will contain the test run details with pie charts displaying test outcomes and test failure analysis.

Figure 3.0 – Sample content from reports generated using Test Scribe

Known Issues/Limitations

1. Customizing the generated report by changing the template, adding comments, including attachments etc is not supported

2. While opening a test plan summary document in  Office 2007, if you get the warning: “The file Test Plan Summary cannot be
opened because there are problems with the contents” (with Details: ‘The file is corrupt and cannot be opened’), click ‘OK’. Then, click ‘Yes’ to recover the
contents of the document. This will then open the document in Office 2007. The same problem is not found in Office 2010.

3. Generated documents are stored by default in the “My documents” folder. The output path of the generated report cannot be modified.

4. Exporting word documents for individual test suites or test cases in a test plan is not supported.