Is the Microsoft Lab Management usable for native projects or .Net only?

Question

Microsoft are pushing their ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) tools such as TFS very hard but often gloss over the fact that major features are only available for managed (.Net) code. eg: Intellitrace is c# and VB-only

Are there any benefits to using Lab Management with a pure native application?

We have two major apps, one with a Java UI and the other MFC. There have been suggestions that the Lab Manager will be broadly rolled-out in the company but I have strong doubts that we will gain anything.

According to this March 2011 table of test automation support, Java is not supported and MFC only for basic controls.

[edit] Prior to the latest vNext release, we couldn't use their TestManager for unit tests unless we wrap our C++ code in .Net layers with C++/CLI unit tests.

So it seems that none of the various ways of testing code can be used for our apps.

Answer 1

Absolutely! Lab Management could help out quite a bit for all sorts of non-.NET applications. It's great for setting up development or test environments made up of multiple machines. You can use the data collectors with Microsoft Test Managers to collect rich data from each of the machines in your environments when you are running test cases or performing exploratory testing. Whenever you find a bug, you can file a bug and each of the data collectors on each of the machines in the environment under test will be queried and attached to a pretty nice bug report for you. You can snapshot, rollback, etc. You can automate test runs and deployments of builds to environments.

You can use Lab Management even with shared or dedicated environments per testers. If your environments require it, you could even use network isolation between the environments to make sure clones of the environments don't cause problems with other clones.

Lab Management also helps if you need to test your apps against multiple configurations. Imagine you need to test your MFC or Java app on Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003, etc. You could spin up individual environments with the different configurations and test against each of them appropriately. Microsoft Test Manager can keep track of pass/fail results for your test cases in each of those configurations as well.

You're absolutely right though. Certain data collectors that come out of the box won't work well or not at all with non-.NET applications. However, the data collector system is completely extensible. If there is something you want to automatically gather, you can create your own custom data collector for use in Lab Management.

There's a lot you can take advantage in Lab Management with testing against non-.NET applications.