Situation
Founded in 2004, Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Notion Solutions provides consulting services that help software development organizations get the most out of the Microsoft Visual Studio development system. Services include migration planning workshops, "Jumpstart" consulting engagements, training courses, and more. Notion Solutions also develops and sells Notion Tools, a suite of extensions for Visual Studio that helps teams better plan and manage the software development process.

As soon as the initial prerelease version of Visual Studio 2010 became available, Notion Solutions began working to adopt it for the company's own product development efforts-both as a means of improving internal product development and to better understand how to help customers do the same. In determining where to start, the company chose to focus on one of its own problem areas: software testing and quality.

"Our software requires lots of testing on various combinations of server and client operating system versions," says Chris Menegay, Vice President of Consulting at Notion Solutions. "We initially thought we had good test coverage across all the different operating systems we need to support, but the number of customer support incidents told us otherwise."

Given the desire to improve the testing process, Notion Solutions came up with three objectives. "First, we wanted to virtualize our test configurations so that we could manage and deploy them more efficiently," says Menegay. "Second, we wanted to be able to easily deploy new builds into those environments. Third, we needed an easy way for people to jump right in and begin testing. We have a very dynamic team, with all developers stepping in and out of
testing roles between client engagements."

Solution

To improve its software testing processes, Notion upgraded its development tools to the latest versions and deployed new virtualization and management technologies for its test environment. Specifically, the company:

• Upgraded all developer desktops from Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team
  Suite to Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate.
• Upgraded from Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 for better version control, workflow management, build automation, automated unit testing, bug tracking, and test case management.
• Used Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 to virtualize all required test environments, and configured Team Foundation Server 2010 to automatically deploy builds into those test environments.
• Adopted Microsoft Test Manager (included in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate) to
  manage test cases, assign them, and capture test results.

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