On this past Thursday, I caught Mark Mydland's user group stop here in Cleveland, as part of his Heartland tour. He was showing off VSTS 2010, formerly codenamed Rosario, and some of the features it has to offer.

One of the things he showed us was a bug report complete with screenshots, comments, and even a TiVo-esque "XBox for Debugging" (Diagnostic Trace Collector) feature - where you can see the test as it was run, complete with a timeline. So you can watch the test as it was run and fast forward or rewind it. I have to wonder, since Mark kept referring to the XBox, do you unlock achievements after passing x amount of tests?



While showing off some of the features, he also wanted to show off a couple things that Microsoft Research has in the works. Pex is a whitebox testing tool that he showed off, generating unit tests with high code coverage. Originally part of MS Research, it is now handled by Devlabs.

The other project that he showed off, that will also be handled by Devlabs, is CHESS. Until Devlabs gets more up on their site for it, you can check out its Microsoft Research site. What CHESS does is it runs through schedules of threads to find various types of errors in multi-threaded programs. It can store the execution of the buggy thread, for the developer to play back and see just where the issue is happening. Currently, the Win32 version is available for academic evaluation, but other versions are in the works, including one to work with .NET apps.

If you get a chance to hear his talk, I'd highly recommend you check it out. Mark's presentation is quite informative, definitely geared for developers to see what the testing suite can do.

Labels: CHESS, Devlabs, Mark Mydland, Microsoft, Microsoft Research, Pex, Rosario

On Thursday, November 13th, the principal group manager of Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers will be here in Cleveland, visiting various clients and then presenting for the GCPCUG VB.NET/C# SIG that night. All are invited to attend.

• What: Meet Mark Mydland, Principal Group Manager of Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers


• When: Thursday, November 13th, 6:30pm-8:30pm


• Where: Beacon Place Conference Center, Beacon Place Office Building, 6055 Rockside Woods Blvd, Lower Level, Independence, OH 44131

Mark will be giving a talk on VSTS 2010, code-named "Rosario".

Here's the abstract for his talk:

The phrase "drive quality upstream" has been abused so badly by ALM software vendors that it has to be relegated to the platitude junk pile along with such all time favorites as "work smarter not harder," "Think outside the box," and "Synergistic leveraging of code reuse." Before we drive quality anywhere we need to give quality a seat at the table. VSTS Rosario release will do this by automatically gathering critical information about the project and code and making that data available when, where and to whom it is needed. During this discussion we will examine how Rosario impacts quality across the application lifecycle by:

• Allowing testers to provide developers with details about what the code did instead of just providing the details about what the tester did.


• Allowing development leads and architects to visualize and understand their current code (not the code they wish they had, but the code they really have) so that they can minimize the impact of changes; and


• Allowing developers to understand the impact of their changes in terms of affected tests, concurrency and bounds checking.

The Rosario release of VSTS will bring all project stakeholders together to allow richer information to be shared across every role to make software quality accessible and achievable.

Mark Mydland is the Principal Group Manager for the Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers product at Microsoft. In the past 12 years, Mark has worked as a developer and consultant across a wide variety of applications and industries. Mark first joined Microsoft in 2001 working as a member of the Natural Interactive Services Division (NISD). During his time in that group, Mark was the development manager for a team focused on analytics for assessing the efficacy of natural language interpreters with a particular emphasis on driving authoring simplification and relevance quality for user assistance. Based on this work, Mark filed numerous patents and coauthored a paper for the SIGIR journal. In 2004, Mark left Microsoft to work as a Director of Development at Getty Images where he led a change in process from a traditional waterfall methodology to a scrum-based agile approach which brought the release frequency from 12-18 months down to 1 month. Since Getty made extensive use of VSTS, it seemed a natural fit for Mark to join VSTS on his return to Microsoft in 2006. Mark received his B.S. from West Point in 1991. He has also held positions with USWeb/marchFirst and Andersen Consulting/Accenture.

Please visit the GCPCUG VB.NET/C# SIG site to RSVP for this event. Hope to see you there!

Labels: GCPCUG, Mark Mydland, Rosario, VSTS 2010