A little background might be required here. The way our development process is set up we have multiple branches of our apps in TFS:
- The ‘Trunk’ branch – which the developers are constantly updating.
- The ‘UAT’ branch – where the developers merge their changes down to when they consider their work to be done for the upcoming release.
Basically the developers work on their Ironspeed applications in the ‘Trunk’ until they consider their work for the upcoming release to be complete, at this point they merge the changes into my ‘UAT’ branch. By operating in this way it means I get a more solid version of the application to work with and test instead of an app that is changing on a daily (or perhaps even more frequent) basis.
The problem with this is that I’m never 100% sure when a new build is available for testing, enter Gated Check Ins. The developers use these to tell them whether or not a version they checked in has successfully built on the server; obviously as a tester I’m interested only really interested in successful builds.
Thanks to this I now have a set up where the TFS server will email me whenever any of the applications I test are successfully updated. Following a little configuration in Outlook these are all moved to their own folder and as a result my regular process is hardly even interrupted. This proves helpful as I’m no longer constantly having to ask the dev’s whether the new version of the app has been merged down or not (which in turn helps us all keep sane).