Over the past few weeks, I've learned about some things in Team System that are different than what I had been thinking for some time. Some of these items are things that I was told by others many months ago, some of them are things that I think I just started assuming were true (because they should be!), but I apparently never validated. I started thinking about this a bit more after having a brief conversation with Eric Lee at TechEd. For those of you that don't know of Eric, of the people I've met at Microsoft, he probably has the most in-depth knowledge of Team System across the breadth of the product (if that makes sense). He admitted that he has things as well that he'd been assuming (some of which that were originally supposed to be in the product) that turned out not to be true. I wonder how many other people have some bad assumptions with Team System? Team System has proved particular challenging, because when Microsoft decides to add a feature - they "announce" it. But when the feature gets cut - there is no such announcement.
So, in the spirit of trying to be transparent with some bad assumptions that I had, the following is a list of items that I once thought were true, but I have found out that they are not!
1. Manual tests can be set up in process templates - nope, the manual test template is actually stored on the local hard drive and cannot be centrally managed. Who missed that?
2. Manual tests can be Excel spreadsheets - I think I heard someone say this once and have been repeating it ever since. Turns out they MUST be either text or Word docs.
3. "Clean build" check-in policy makes sure your code compiles cleanly before a check-in. - This policy seem to just check the errors window - so if you don't compile first, it doesn't complain (of course, VB's background compile will help with this).
4. Check-in policy can be set in a process template - I mentioned this in an earlier blog. I think this was a feature that was cut.
5. You could create test lists from VSTE/SD - VSTE/SD doesn't include Test Manager, just Test View, so you can't create test lists. Where this gets really weird is that you need a test list for the build process... you extrapolate the rest out. This has to change by RTM...
6. You can add a webserverendpoint to a database server in the datacenter diagram. - This may seem odd to some people, but I always figured I could create a "logical" server that had both my SQL Reporting and SQL DB on the same logical box. This can't be done, and they must be separate logical servers. This makes sense when you think about it - I just never really put much thought into it. That said, I'm not sure I like it...
Well, that's it for now, I'll post some more as I learn more and invalidate bad ideas that I might have in my head.