Visual Studio Team Lab Management

Software development teams are under pressure to do more with less. The
demand to complete projects on time and with higher quality has only increased.
To simplify common tasks, developers are using more and more sophisticated
development tools and frameworks. Testers are increasingly relying on testing
tools to efficiently manage and run test cases. Version control and build
management tools have become common place in every project. And teams are
adopting project management tools and new agile methodologies to drive higher
efficiencies.

Nevertheless, software development teams still spend enormous times in
setting up and maintaining environments for development, testing, integration,
and staging. They spend significant resources in deploying every build on these
environments before an application goes to production. Ad-hoc processes are
followed to rollback an environment and to re-try the process each time a
deployment fails. Finding hard-to-find bugs and identifying steps to reproduce
an issue are still more of an art than science. And because of project
deadlines, developers often do not have the time to re-create environments to
adequately verify their fixes. These problems are causing software teams to
remain inefficient.

Visual Studio 2010, the upcoming release of Visual Studio from Microsoft,
promises to take software development to the next level by addressing these
inefficiencies. In addition to offering significant new capabilities for
software testing, project tracking, build management, and version control,
Visual Studio 2010 offers virtual lab management. Virtual lab management uses
virtualization technology to make creation of environments, deployment of builds
on those environments, and running tests a whole lot easier. In this article we
take a deeper look at these key features of Visual Studio Team Lab Management
and how they can remove inefficiencies and increase productivity of software
development teams. The next section describes the basics of virtualization and
how it benefits software development. Subsequent sections examine the prominent
features of Visual Studio Team Lab Management in greater detail.

Virtual lab management

Virtualization is a means of running multiple computers on a single physical
computer. Each computer running on the physical computer has a complete
operating system and application stack and is known as a virtual machine.
Virtual machines have two key capabilities that make them ideal for use in
software development. Being emulated in software, an entire virtual machine can
be copied by just copying a set of files. As a result, an environment that is
made of virtual machines can be copied as many times as required without the
need for installing software over and over again. The second capability of
virtual machines that is handy for development teams is snapshots. A snapshot is
a 'marker' of an entire state of a virtual machine at a given time. Once
created, a user can revert to that snapshot at any time, and resume the
execution of the machine from exactly the same state as it was in when the
snapshot was taken. This makes it very convenient to preserve the clean state of
an environment. One can revert to this clean state before deploying a build or
after running tests.

Here we create a new environment, which comprises of two virtual machines.

Visual Studio Team Lab Management makes virtualization easily accessible to
developers and testers. It enables teams to accelerate setup and restoration of
complex environments to a known clean state for test execution and build
automation. It also allows testers to file rich bugs with links to environment
snapshots that developers can then use to recreate complex environments,
effectively reducing wasted time and resources in development and test
lifecycle. Moreover, these capabilities are integrated into development and
testing tools that teams are already familiar with.

In this screen, you can define workflow for different processes in Team Lab Management.

Creating environments

In the process of developing applications, software teams create and manage
multiple environments. Using Visual Studio Team Lab Management, team members can
create environments on the fly from a set of golden master images stored in a
library. An environment in Team Lab Management is simply a collection of virtual
machines, each fulfilling a role for the application. For instance, an
environment can consist of a virtual machine serving as a database and another
virtual machine serving as a web server. The master images are pre-created
virtual machines with the right operating system and application pre-requisites.
The creation of these master images is a one-time activity and can even be
performed by converting physical machines that are used in production into
virtual machines.

Follow these steps in order to create a virtual environment:

• Create one or more golden master virtual machines in the library using
  Virtual Machine Manager. Install the team agents — lab agent, test agent, and
  build agent - on these virtual machines.
• Using Test and Lab Manager, import the golden masters into your team
  project.
• Create a virtual environment from the golden masters. Select the testing,
  workflow, and network isolation capabilities while creating the environment.

This paradigm of creating an environment on-demand from a set of master
images and making that accessible to developers and testers changes the way
software teams provision environments. Without adding the work of installing
software or configuring the application, software teams can create environments
with the click of a button. Additionally, they can be assured that their
environments mimic the production environment.

Here you can file for a bug across logs and also get a complete snapshot of the environment.

Deploying builds

Every time a new build is created, teams use scripts to deploy it on various
environments. And often, one has to run a set of basic verification tests to
test the sanity of a build. Visual Studio Team Lab Management formalizes the
deployment process through the definition of a build-deploy-test workflow. The
pre-packaged workflow in Team Lab Management performs the build of an
application, followed by reverting of an environment to a clean snapshot,
deployment of the build onto the environment, and then finally running a set of
tests. Teams can either use this pre-packaged workflow and specify the
deployment scripts or customize this workflow to perform more complex tasks.

Follow these steps in order to create a build-deploy-test workflow:

• Using Visual Studio Team Explorer, create a new build definition from 'lab
  default template'.
• While creating the definition select the virtual environment, the
  definition for compiling sources, the scripts for deployment, and the test
  suite.
• Once created, queue the new build definition.

With this, development teams do not have to worry about consistency of the
deployment process in various environments. They also do not have to spend time
in running rollback scripts or performing additional procedures when deployment
fails half way through. They can simply revert to the clean snapshot of the
environment before deploying the next build.

You can create several copies of an environment and share it with multiple users.

Running tests

Visual Studio Team Lab Management integrates with testing tools in Visual
Studio to simplify running of manual or automated tests on environments. Testing
tools in Visual Studio already have the capability to collect logs of various
forms from the machines in an environment. Testers can attach these logs when
they file bugs. With Team Lab Management, testers can also include a snapshot of
the entire environment to the bug. Developers can then connect to the same
environment or to a copy of the environment in order to reproduce the problem or
to validate their fix.

Follow these steps in order to file a bug using a snapshot:

• While testing on a virtual environment using Microsoft Test Runner, take a
  snapshot of the environment.
• When a bug is filed, the snapshot is then attached to the bug in the form
  of an attachment.
• When a developer sees the bug in Team Explorer, he can open the attachment
  to connect to the same environment.

With this feature, testers do not have to spend time finding a consistent
reproduction for an accidental bug that they discovered. Coupled with the rich
data collection features of Visual Studio, the snapshots in lab management
provide all the information necessary for a developer to act upon an issue. The
turnaround time of a bug that is otherwise spent trying to reproduce the problem
or to recreate the environment is cut down.

Copying environments

Since environments are made of virtual machines, they can be easily copied.
Each developer and tester can have a copy of the environment containing the
required build. However, bringing up copies of environments at the same time
causes computer name and other networking conflicts. Lab management solves this
problem through a technology called network isolation, which automatically
configures the network of virtual machines and their IP stack to avoid
conflicts.

Follow these steps in order to copy environments:

• When creating the environment, ensure that network isolation capability is
  selected.
• After working with it, shut down the environment and store a copy in
  library.
• Deploy another copy of the environment from the library. At this point,
  you have two deployed environments.

Summary

Virtualization simplifies software development. A number of teams and
organizations realizing this are already adopting virtualization — some through
the use of desktop virtualization tools such as Virtual PC, and others through
the development of home-grown tools for managing virtual labs. Visual Studio
Team Lab Management addresses this exact need through an out-of-the-box
solution. Compared to other competitive tools in this space, Visual Studio Team
Lab Management has two advantages: it integrates the otherwise complex task of
managing virtual machines into tools and processes that developers and testers
are already familiar with; and it does not require expensive hardware thereby
removing the adoption barrier for projects and department level teams. To learn
more about how Visual Studio Team Lab Management can increase the productivity
of your team or to try the product, visit the primary link given in the box.

Vijay Machiraju, Sr. Program Manager, Visual Studio Team Lab Management