Developer edition of Visual Studio Team System unfortunately doesn't include Webtests

At PDC05 I attended a very good presentation on Visual Studio Team System testing. The presenter walked through a scenerio where a developer was beginning to work on an ASP.NET web application and after getting the code from source control, needed to run a set of build verification tests (BVTs) to make sure everything was set up properly. He used VSTS's awesome new webtests (think...vastly improved Application Center Test a.k.a. ACT) to do this. What he failed to mention is that for most developers this scenario won't be possible because if I understood correctly, the webtest feature isn't included in the Developer edition. It is only in the Tester edition and the full suite.

If you have an MSDN Universal subscription like I do, you have the option to choose between one of the three editions (Architect, Developer or Tester), and for many of us the logical choice will be the Software Developer, but it's going to be another bunch of money to upgrade to the full suite. This was disappointing to me because I see incredible value in putting testing tools in the hands of the developers, and not just testers. This encourages test driven development, and performance checking. I personally like to test the performance impact of various design decisions on my apps. Did the change you just made help or hurt performance? If you don't profile it, you will probably never know. I was hoping that at the very least the developer would be able to execute the webtests if not record them. It really is too bad that such a valuable tool won't be available to developers without having to pay extra for the full suite.

3 Comments

  • Sadly this is also my understanding of the availability of the test tools. As an MSDN Universal subscriber I find this very annoying.



    What I'm not clear on is what do we get in the Developer Edition that we wouldn't in (say) the Tester Edition? In other words, is it still possible to perform development in the Tester/Architect Edition? What features are missing?

  • I'm disappointed about this too. I was thinking of migrating my NUnit tests to MS's new test architecture, but since it won't be in the developer edition, I will probably stick with NUnit. Hopefully they are quick to publish a 2.0 compatible NUnit.

  • Lance, I think you may have misunderstood, the unit tests certainly are in the developer edition, it's just the WEB tests that aren't.

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