Visual Studio 2010 Launch Event

Earlier this week, I went to the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 launch event. It was informative and gave me a few ideas about how my testing is going to have to change in the upcoming months.

Microsoft seems to be pushing multi-touch screens. Testing a multi-touch screen is going to be different. At first, it's going to have to be mainly manual testing since I don't see any tools that would allow automating it. In fact, I just don't see how you can automate testing gestures. Sure, you could have some sort of simulator or even wire directly into the input stream, but a fully-automated system won't be able to account for human movement. The automated gestures would be too perfect. Touch screen interface testing is all about how it "feels," and you can't automate human perception (at least not yet).

Two more hot points are SharePoint and Windows Phone 7. SharePoint doesn't directly affect my testing, but the company I work for is moving towards it. It's going to change how I organize my test plans and testing tools as well as how I find information such as PRDs and MRDs. It's definitely much better than throwing everything in a network share, but it's going to take some getting used to.

Windows Phone 7 will likely affect my testing. I would be surprised if I don't wind up having to test some apps on that platform in the near future. It looks like it has some cool features, but we'll have to see how it does against the big boys in the mobile market. Sure, the market is expanding, but there are already some major players in there with a strong market share. Even MS will have a hard time gaining a large chunk of share, no matter how good they can make Windows Phone 7.

I did notice a couple of things during the event. Microsoft supplied lunch at the event. In with my sandwich was some fresh fruit. I thought it was kind of ironic that Microsoft chose an apple, so they wound up giving out apples at a Microsoft event.

The other thing I noticed was that just about every person giving a demo wound up lost in their own application. They couldn't find menu items. They didn't see a missing brace in the code. They didn't know where the icon to launch their demo was on the desktop. It pretty much confirms "Troy's Theory of Technical Throngs:" the amount of time it takes to find something on a computer is directly proportional to the number of people watching you.