Drop "Test Explorer" view and revert to the VS 2010 Test View and Test Results paradigm
I hate to bring forth blank statements like this but the Test Explorer in VS 2012 sucks. I waiting for the beta cycle to finish because I was under the impression serious improvements where in the works but now that I have the RC in my hands I'm very disapointed.
This is a major regression.
1) Believe it or not I can't even copy exception messages from the unit test results
2) I Can't run a test in context like I used to be able to (or i don't know how to)
3) I can't group tests by class name or any other way
4) I can't control the columns I'd like to see.
Either I'm completely missing something or you guys completely missed something. I hope its just me. For now I'd suggest you reintroduce the VS 2010 Test View as a solution.
Anonymous
shared this idea
Most of the requests from the initial idea and comments have been addressed in Visual Studio 2012 RTM, Update 1, and the upcoming Update 2. If you still feel that something is missing please open up a new more specific idea.
22 comments
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Dave
commented
Could we please get "Associate Test to Case" in the right click menu back. It was extremely helpful to have the search dialog come up and to be able to search for a test case by id. It made my day much more efficient.
Thanks.
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Daniel Meech
commented
It would be nice to know what tests are currently running as we quite often experience the Test Explorer hanging. We have no idea if it is a bad test or just the test engine!
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Geoffrey Rayback
commented
My biggest problem is I can't tell which tests have run, which are running, and which didn't run in any given test run. It seems to me that tests that are running have a success icon (?) which is ever so slightly lighter green than test which passed? Is that right? And the tests all reorder themselves (randomly?) every time you do a test run so I can't find my ever so slightly less green test which maybe passed or is possibly still running or maybe didn't run at all? What? What was wrong with the little spinner on tests that were running and no icon at all on tests that didn't run? That was impossible to mistake. Now I end up running all my tests multiple times just to make sure they really ran. What a time saver!
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Radu Crisan
commented
In VS 2012 Test Explorer I do not see a unit test description anymore.(the one I add as attribute Description("my unit test description"). I cannot choose what columns to display. Why on earth you removed these things?
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chrclausen
commented
I am not so concerned with missing features, more with stability. If you search the Internet with the following keywords, you will see what I mean: test explorer visual studio crash
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TestUser1253
commented
Other major bugs - TestContext doesn't work reliably when upgrading .NET 3.5 unit test projects, can't "view output" of tests (thus can't view logs anymore), frequent crashes of VSTTExecution engine. Despite opening Microsoft support ticket (where the undocumented workaround of toggling target framework from 3.5 to 4.5 to 3.5) worked in some cases, still can't realiably use TestContext in our tests. This works without issue in 2010
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Anonymous
commented
It would save me (and MS) so much time if they didn't cache anything. I find that Test Explorer often doesn't list all my tests and Pending Changes window often misses some pending changes. There is simply no need for cache anymore, why do people continue to write and use them? They waste far more time than they save.
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Sean Yao commented
This new test explorer still sucks even in Update 1. Besides the ones mentioned above, I still missed the following:
1) It doesn't show the test case that is current running. If a broken test which runs forever, I can't find the test easily.
2) I can't sort the tests by StartTime or EndTime, which is useful to trouble shoot some test teardown bugs. -
Joshua Weber - msft
commented
Group by class will be added in Update 2. The Visual Studio ALM Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/ is a great resource for announcements and further information on Updates as they are announced.
Josh
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PaoloPablito
commented
Microsoft said:
"Most of the requests from the initial idea and comments have been addressed in Visual Studio 2012 RTM, Update 1, and the upcoming Update 2. If you still feel that something is missing please open up a new more specific idea"We'll do it... when Update 2 is released.
What are your plans about it ? -
Kevin Logan
commented
I'm using update 1, which is better, but I'm missing group by class name. I'm using a BDD approach so I have test classes named When_logging_in and When_navigates_to.
Otherwise, I find my self using a combo of Resharper's unit test runner and this one. In 2010, I was only using Resharper's. So that's an improvement.
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averysebastian
commented
The new Test Explorer just sucks. We should be able to use the old interface if we want.
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PaoloPablito
commented
Microsoft promised improvements to the Unit Test interface for the Update 1, in fact now the Test Explorer has new filtering capabilities. I still cannot filter by namespace like in good old Test List Editor, but I can simulate it by filtering on Full Qualified Name.
But other things in the Unit Test world of VS 2012 leave me disappointed, they are the same things that left me disappointed before applying Update 1:
- it looks slower to me. I created two copies of the same solution and opened it with VS 2008 and 2012 on the same Win2008R2sp1 machine (a virtual machine on VMWare LabManager, not a real machine, but it's the SAME machine, so they are on an even footing). I selected a bunch of random tests and executed them on both VS 2008 and 2012. VS 2008 executed my tests in a few seconds, with VS 2012 I had to wait at least 18-20 seconds to see the results. I retries the same tests multiple times but I got the same results. It looks like the problem is the "initial sprint", not the actual test execution. Even if I select a SINGLE test, it takes at least 5 seconds to show me the results, and then Test Explorer says that the actual execution took only 129 milliseconds! Is there some VSHOST trick to activate?
- the beloved Test List Editor is STILL deprecated and cannot run selected tests
- the Test Explorer still doesn't allow you to select individual tests with checkboxes like the good old Test List Editor. I often find clicking checkboxes more convenient than CTRL+clicking the desired tests.
- there's still no test toolbar (or at least I cannot see it in the toolbar list)
- When I'm in the source code and I run a test, I'd like to be brought immediately to the window that shows my test running, it does not happen in VS 2012 (but it used to happen in previous versions). It happens later when the test finishes: but if there's a filter in Test Explorer, I cannot see the results, I have to clear the filter.
- If I click Debug or press F5 in previous versions, all tests in the current PROJECT (not solution) are executed. VS 2012 does not execute anything, it complains that this is a DLL and cannot be run.
- the Test Result windows does not work as it worked in VS 2008 and 2010, it does not show anything. Test results are shown in the Test Explorer exactly like before applying the Update 1, this view is clumsly and I don't find it useful like the good old Test Result window. To see the error messages, I have to click on single failed tests, I'd like to have a look at error messages at a glance to get the big picture. This is very important for me when I try to use a TDD-like approach.
Is there a way to customize the data shown by Test Explorer? Where? (VS 2010 has a "Test Tools" branch in the Option dialog, but VS 2012 hasn't it).
Sorry for the long list of complaints (which, by the way, I already posted on Brian Harry's blog) but I have to say what I think. I still prefer the testing interface of VS 2008 and 2010 (and I prefer 2008 when it does not force me to click Refresh in the Test List Editor)
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Anonymous
commented
I agree Test Explorer in the Pro sku is only useful to kick off the test and see the final result. As a Tester I want/need to know what is currently executing I have no view into what tests are executing or what still needs to be executed in a run, I used to get this information in the Test Results window but with the Pro sku nothing is showing in the Test Results window. Either something is broken on my machine or for this sku the window is not hooked up.
Also, how do you stop a run? For example, I kick off a run with 10 test cases and one of them fails and I want to stop executing the rest of the test cases how do I do this? I currently see no way to stop/pause a run that is executing - which kind of goes back to the fact I have no indicators that something is executing this is EXTREMLY frustrating.
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FormerVS2010user
commented
Please add a refresh button so we can get the latest added Tests.
Simply bring back the old View Test from visual studio 2010.
Test explorer 2012 is a huge disappointment!!! -
Anonymous
commented
I want to be able to group tests by class, by namespace, by fully qualified name, by execution time, by result, and every other conceivable way possible. I would also like to be able to run tests from a test class with right-clicking (doesn't seem to work). I also want to be able to tell if a test is in progress. I also want to be able to copy text from the output window.
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Martin Moe
commented
>. Other then class name, what specificaly would you like to see for grouping options for any other way?
At least the stuff we had in the past. I really used it you know. It was one of the great things that you could slice and dice both with grouping and filtering. Right now I cannot recommend that we make the transition to VS2012 based on all the good functionality you have ripped out of it, where this is but one example.
At the same time, we would like to target 4.5 though so we have a huge dilemma here.
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Leon Breedt
commented
The test view doesn't come up when you run the tests, if you have it auto-hidden. You have to go and un-auto-hide it.
Test progress reporting is much worse, you never know what's currently running.
Just knowing that there's a current run going is a bit of a guess, it sometimes displays out of date progress bars, and I'm never quite sure if it ran or not or if the results are stale, or if it is actually never going to do the run. Sometimes I have to press Ctrl R, A multiple times "just to be sure".Sometimes when I definitely have made source code changes it tells me test run is not available in current context when I press Ctrl R, A.
Miraculously, the menu item works though.
But not always.
Indeterminism like this in my tools really annoys me. Either work entirely, or don't work entirely, don't sometimes work and sometimes not.
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Daniel Harman
commented
I'd like to see the tests as a tree view so we can see summaries of pass/fail at a macro level, not individual test level. Coderushes test runner is a nice example of what I mean. Tree view should at least be module->class->test, but really I think namespace should be in there too, in the same way as it in class/solution explorer.
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Koen Willemse commented
5) Not being able to order the results of the unit tests is also very annoying. In VS 2010 I could order my tests by execution time to see which run slow and need attention, but that seems to be impossible now
6) The summary page keeps displaying information about the previous run which is very confusing. I would expect it to display information of the current run I'm doing
7) I can't see which test is currently running
8) It doesn't show the Test Explorer automatically when I run all tests using the CTRL+R, A shortcut, so I don't even see that it is running my tests. It opens after all tests are executed, but that is not very helpfull when running > 2000 tests.Overall a big disappointment, so hopefully a lot of work will be put in making the Test Explorer easy to use or to revert to previous solution
