Testing Dashboards in 2008: Publish Status and Predict Outcome Automatically
Marnie Hutcheson, Consultant
Ideva

SharePoint is the core of Microsoft's collaboration initiative.  First introduced in the late 1990's  it  is finally taking its place as the defacto document management and creation facility of business.  Corporate IT departments are adopting it across the board as part of the underlying system architecture because of its unified security, easy administration, and low cost to maintain...  Not to mention that it comes free with MS Office. 

SharePoint provides web based collaboration and document management services, meaning, no extra cost to purchase specialty products or maintain across the corporation.  For example:  It only takes about 4 hours to create your own secure corporate bug tracking system.  Why waste time building a traceability matrix?  One ad hoc search of your companies SharePoint web sites will bring you  a list of every reference to a requirement; from business, development, test, customer service, and any other portals you have linked into the SharePoint security umbrella.  SharePoint can manage and share  any office document be it Word, Excel, PowerPoint, html document, XML, access data base, Visio drawing, PDF file, scanned image,  etc.

So, what's new in 2008 dashboards is collaboration and data from virtually any data source, like

• The test bug base, CS reporting, and development
• Test Plans, designs, schedules, actual, milestones
• Requirements, contracts, design docs, test docs, and operations admin specs
• Basically any data sources you want to tap, not just your own

 This presentation will take you on a tour of a collaborative test team website and show you how you can create and automate a single source test team site of your own.

Marnie Hutcheson is a columnist for MSDN Magazine and TechNET Magazine. She also creates technical courseware for Microsoft Corporation and travels around the world training the trainers who teach these technologies to the world. She is an internationally published author and speaker in the areas of software development, testing and quality assurance, and systems administration.

She began her career in engineering at Prodigy Services Company in 1987 as the Lead Systems Integrator for Shopping, and later Banking and Financial Services. Over the years, she has become a leader in the development of the Web and has helped corporations like GTE and Microsoft develop and launch several major Internet technologies.