Difference Between Microsoft Test Manager and Visual Studio Test Professional

When talking with our consulting customers and leading our 4-Hour Testing Workshops across North America, there is some common confusion about what exactly the differences are between Microsoft Test Manager and Visual Studio Test Professional.  It’s a pretty simple difference that I’ll see if I can help clarify and share some additional news for the vNext release of the Visual Studio family of products at the same time.  Once you get the difference, it will make perfect sense!

Visual Studio Test Professional

Visual Studio Test Professional is one of the different SKUs that you can purchase from the Visual Studio family of products.  What this means is that this is the “box” that you buy.  You can’t buy Microsoft Test Manager.  You buy an edition of Visual Studio that includes Microsoft Test Manager.  Visual Studio Test Professional happens to be the edition that many people will get when they are looking only to get Microsoft Test Manager (in addition to a TFS CAL and MSDN Subscription).

Microsoft Test Manager

Microsoft Test Manager is the application you use to interact with Team Foundation Server to:

• Create and manage test plans
• Create, author, and maintain manual and automated test cases
• Manage association of automation for test case artifacts
• Run exploratory tests
• Analyze previous manual, automated, or exploratory test runs
• File rich actionable bugs while executing manual test runs or from automated test runs
• Create and provision individual or shared lab environments with multiple machines for development or testing with Lab Management
• Connect to physical or virtual lab environments for development or testing with Lab Management
• Facilitate structured User Acceptance Testing (UAT) from business users
• And lots more…

Microsoft Test Manager actually is included with two of the different SKUs or Visual Studio editions in the Visual Studio 2010 release.  You can acquire either Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate or Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional to receive Microsoft Test Manager.

Visual Studio “11” Release Changes – So Far

(Written for Beta) Microsoft has announced that Microsoft Test Manager will now be included in the Visual Studio Premium edition in addition to Visual Studio Ultimate and Visual Studio Test Professional.  That’s a great change and brings a lot of value to the Visual Studio Premium SKU!  You can find out some additional comparisons (that have been publicly announced so far) here on the Microsoft site:  http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/11/en-us/products/compare

Need Help?

Let me know if you have any additional questions!  We help customers all the time figure out what types of licenses they should get, advocate to get the best pricing for their company, and sort through all of the licensing details to come up with the best scenario.  Contact me and I’ll be happy to get you started down the right path.  BTW – if there is also one thing to remember, don’t pay retail prices for any Visual Studio licenses before you come talk to us!

Ed Blankenship