Deprecating VS2008 Support in Test Studio 2013 Releases

With each release of Test Studio, we carefully test our integration points with all external systems to make sure we work seamlessly with the latest and greatest versions of these systems. Test Studio has many dependencies that we rely on to offer our customers a great user experience. These dependencies include all the browsers we automate (IE, FF, Chrome & Safari), Visual Studio that we plug-in and recently Quality Center and TeamPulse which we integrate with.

With each of these components, we not only try to support the latest and greatest versions but also be backward compatibility with as many versions as possible. For example, Test Studio today supports Visual Studio 2008, 2010 & 2012, it also supports IE versions 7->10, Firefox versions 4 through the latest…etc.

Supporting such a large matrix of products is no easy or cheap task for the development & QA teams. Our testing matrix only gets expanded exponentially and we are constantly working around bugs that are fixed in future versions. So, as part of each release we evaluate the support matrix and look at ways to optimize it. We typically look at customer data that tell us how many of our customers are using a specific version or platform and based on that data we try to keep or drop support for a specific product/version.

With the release of VS2012 and looking at the data we have in terms of usage, we are dropping support for VS2008 for our Test Studio Plug-in starting R1 2013. With R1 2013, we will require VS2010 or VS2012 to use the Test Studio Plug-in. We wanted to inform all our customers with this decision way in advance to give them a chance to voice any concerns (if any) and help them prepare for our next great release coming up next year!

All the best

Faris Sweis