2 Handy Features in VSTE\Software Testers - Transactions and Analysis Notes

Hey guys,

There are 2 features I wanted to call attention to that are really handy in Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers.

Small features sometimes go a long way - the Analysis window might become one of those features.  When looking at the results of a Load Test, the context menu for just about any part of those results will give you an Analysis... option.

That option is basically a handy scratchpad for recording your thoughts for the results.  This can really be helpful given that load test results can be very time consuming to analyze.

The second feature is related to web and load testing as well.  One very handy feature about a web test is the ability to group requests into transactions.

Often times, a series of web requests make a single user action.  For example, working your way through a series of registration pages could be thought of collectively as the registration action.  It may be of interest to categorize scalability and performance results based on these actions.

In the web test editor, the Transaction feature is used to do this categorization.  This option is available on the context menu.

Basically, you just choose your begin and end transactions.

Once your transactions are defined, when you run your web test inside of a load test, you can see transaction-based timing information.

This data is available as a table in your load test results.

The information you get on a transaction basis can be very valuable - for example, the load test will gather the average time it took to complete a transaction for you.

Just a couple of handy features that I wanted to share.

Thanks!

Eric.