FAQ: What is the difference between “Assigned To” and “Tester” in MTM?

FAQ: In Microsoft Test Manager (MTM), what is the difference between the “Assigned To” field of the Test Case work item and the “Tester” field in MTM.  It seems these to fields are stored independently. So if I assign someone test cases through MTM then this is not translated into the “Assigned To” on the WIT.

A: The “Assigned To” is a field on the test case work item.  The “Tester” is a field on the Test Point artifact.  A Test Point is a Test Case * Test Configuration.  For example, for a given Test Case, you might want to test it on two different versions of the browser – so there are two Test Points.

The “Assigned To” field on the test case work item indicates who owns that test case from an authoring and ownership standpoint.  If anyone has questions in the future they can go to that person. This is the person who is suppose to maintain the test case.

The “Testers” column in the Plan & Test tabs of MTM indicates who will be executing that test case for that particular test configuration.  Since you can have multiple configurations for a single test case, you can “assign” a different tester to each of the configurations.  For example, irrespective of who wrote the test cases to start with, you might want to have a particular tester execute all tests on a given configuration (say IE9 on Win7) for efficiency.

Gautam

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 22, 2012
  Hi Gautam, Could you please help me to test my project through MTM. --Shankar

• Anonymous
  February 02, 2012
  @shankar - What help do you need?  Send me mail using the "Email Blog Author" link at the right top.