Embarcadero: Solving Common Visual Studio C++ Problems With Visual Assist, TFS Tool & TestRail Integration

Embarcadero: Solving Common Visual Studio C++ Problems With Visual Assist, TFS Tool & TestRail Integration

You should take to account a lot of different factors to develop quality software. They include a team of professional specialists, intelligent management of the development process, automation of the testing process, and powerful software. To effectively solve all important tasks, you should use modern management and test management solutions (for example, TFS tool and TFS test management tool).

In this article, we will talk about the main problems that programmers and managers face during the software development process and how Visual Assist and TFS Tool – TestRail Integration can help solve these problems.

What are Common Visual Studio C++ Pain Points?

Visual Studio is one of the most popular IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) used by C++ developers. It provides many powerful and useful features for efficient development. However, there are certain challenges faced by programmers using Visual Studio.

·Slow operation and high volume of requested resources when using Intellisense in large projects.

·Difficult to navigate, especially for beginners.

·Complex debugging process.

·The process of finding errors can be quite complex.

·The code snippet feature is poor, it needs to be updated and improved.

·There is a need for additional functions for automatic code generation.

What are the Difficulties in Project Management?

In addition to good development tools, it is also important to manage and test team projects effectively. Let’s list the difficulties that arise in the project management process.

·Unclear business goals and lack of detail in scenarios result in a lot of responsibility for testers to define requirements.

·The need for automation of the testing process.

·The need to reduce the quality control time of new releases.

·Performing testing in a shorter period of time.

·The need to reduce errors in production.

·Tracking the test execution process.

·Increasing the efficiency of the team.

·The need for a clear division of roles and tasks in the team.

·Improvement of cooperation in the middle of the team.

·Increasing deployment frequency.

What is Visual Assist for Visual Studio?

Visual Assist is a productivity extension for Visual Studio development work. It provides a set of intelligent refactoring, navigation, code highlighting, automatic code generation, corrections, and understanding features for C, C++, and C# development. With its highly-efficient memory management and minimal UI, Visual Assist gives developers uninterrupted access to advanced features without slowing down the IDE.

Visual Assist is one of the definitive plugins that conceptualized and shaped most of the current features you see now in Visual Studio. And to this day it continues to develop a user-centric design for maximum productivity and usability.

What are the Benefits of Using Visual Assist?

·A very lightweight solution – minimal UI and intuitive but sparse pop-up menus only when you need them.

·Fully customizable – syntax highlighting, keyboard/mouse shortcuts,

·Advanced navigation features.

·Easy to use. A lot of our users work with very large source codes (and C++ syntax is inherently verbose). Visual Assist decreases the number of steps to perform different actions (open files, find files, find related symbols, classes, etc).

·High-performance coding assistant – Visual Assist’s performance is very fast compared to competitors (eg. parsing and loading time on large code bases).

·Smart – VA is updated to be aware of the most modern coding standards (LLVM/Clang) so users don’t have to study new practices/standards themselves as much.

What is TFS Tool & TestRail Integration?

Microsoft TFS is a popular project management software that includes a lot of tools to simplify the development and testing process and collaboration between team members. Among them are an issue-tracking system, a centralized version control system, a build server, a team portal, and so on. You should sign in via your Microsoft account to start using TFS.

TestRail is a modern centralized test management system, which allows you to combine information about automatic and manual testing in one place. In addition, it provides many features including:

·Ability to create test plans and track progress in their execution.

·Monitor test coverage and traceability.

·Ability to create test cases.

·Running automatic tests and viewing the results of their execution.

·Creating reports.

·And much more.

TestRail provides the ability to integrate with dozens of third-party software, including TFS. Using TFS Tool – TestRail Integration you can easily manage all test cases and test plans in your team project, run tests, add bug reports to TFS and link issue IDs, and track test results, activity, and progress.

TestRail is great for any team project, regardless of the workflow, development method you use, and team size.

Conclusion

In this article, we talked about the main problems faced by programmers, testers, and managers in the software development process. Also, we talked about modern tools that make it easy to solve these problems. The popular and powerful extension Visual Assist for Visual Studio provides many useful features that greatly simplify and speed up the process of writing, testing, and debugging code in Visual Studio. TFS provides tools for project management, and the integration of TFS & TestRail allows you to conveniently view and manage all the tests that are in the project.

FAQ

What is the TFS tool?

TFS (Team Foundation Server) is an ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) tool that allows you to manage the complete life cycle of software development, including requirements gathering, development, and testing.

What is TFS and Jira?

TFS is a project management tool that provides many useful functions such as issue tracking, source control, automatic builds, build server, team portal, and so on. Jira is a simple issue-tracking tool that can integrate with other tools to expand functionality.

Is TFS a DevOps tool?

TFS has been renamed to Azure DevOps Server. It provides project management, source code management, build management, reporting, testing, and release management capabilities.

What is TFS server used for?

TFS server is used as a team foundation version control system that allows you to manage all source files and maintain different versions of the source code. In addition, it provides you the ability to track work items, save documents on a special project portal, and do many other actions related to software management, development, and testing.

Is TFS the same as Git?

TFS has a built-in GIT server that can perform almost all the functions that standard Git has.